Truth has been in the news a lot lately. The denial of science, the promulgation of “alternative facts,” and the casual branding of difficult truths as “fake news” have stretched our political discourse to the breaking point. The very question of what makes something “true” has been torn wide open, and people are taking sides as never before.

This question has challenged me to explore two essential layers of my identity, because I hold truth dear in each of them: I am both a Quaker and a science teacher. Age-old conflicts between science and religion have never played out within me. In fact, my life of faith and my life in science support and complement each other in comforting ways, and I cherish the truths revealed through each.

As a Quaker, I engage in the special acceptance of truth found in meeting for worship. With the gift of continuing revelation, Quakers wait in silence, confident that truth is always a hair’s breadth away. It may be very difficult to cross over into that amazing place where truth lives, but we know it is always there.

As a science teacher, I teach my students every day that truth of another kind exists nearby as well. The stories that science tells us, buoyed by evidence, bring us closer all the time to deep truths about our world. From why birds migrate to how gravity works, science is constantly trying to peek inside, getting closer and closer to how things really work.

I believe in both of these kinds of truth, and they comfortably live together in me without a hint of animosity. I have found a profound metaphor to describe what this cohabitation feels like. Denise Levertov, in her poem “Presence,” describes a distant and mysterious mountain “as if a red ground had been laid beneath not quite translucent white.”

She is invoking a painting technique in which an artist first paints a color on the canvas to give depth and support to the next color, which is painted on top of the first. A sky blue background in a Matisse still life, for example, lays on top of a surprising pink layer. Rothko’s paintings are towering celebrations of this practice, and each rectangle he paints vibrates and shines with multiple colors peeking out from under the surface.

My faith in divine truth is the “ground” beneath my daily work, where I go about my business as a science teacher. However, that business is harder today than it used to be, with science, and the teaching of science, coming under fire from increasingly organized groups of skeptics. Climate change denial and the anti-vaccination movement are two particularly dangerous outcomes of this trend, and our health and safety are now truly at risk from this distrust of difficult truths.

The myth of “mad scientists” in white lab coats still pervades our schools.

The author studying photosynthesis with a student. Photo courtesy of the author.

I find that much of today’s mistrust of science stems from some broad misconceptions of what scientists do, so I spend much of my time with students challenging these misconceptions about how scientists view truth.

In our textbooks and in the media, science is often depicted as a system of beliefs that seeks to prove theories beyond doubt. The myth of “mad scientists” in white lab coats still pervades our schools. These eggheads—almost always white males—are imagined to follow a scientific method, elevating their theories to laws and moving on to hammer out new facts, working somewhere far removed from the general public.

A quick Google image search for “scientist” supports this, revealing hundreds of pictures of white men in white lab coats, staring intently at beakers full of colorful chemicals. These images leave out the vast array of science professions, not to mention egregiously underrepresenting women and people of color. Popular culture has a very narrow view of who scientists are and what they do, and more importantly, how they deal with truth.

Myths like this belie the very important essence of science. Scientists don’t deal in ironclad proof; they deal in evidence. Everything they do boils down to finding ways to support their claims, and then modifying, adapting, and even discarding, when necessary, what they thought they knew.

However, this commitment to the fluidity of knowledge and the willingness to adapt and change beliefs does not mean that scientific truths are flimsy. A common barb thrown at scientists is that they only deal in “theories,” and so nothing is certain. This is not the case. A “theory” for a scientist is true due to overwhelming evidence. If a theory holds up to repeated observations and tests, it is as true as it can be.

Scientists, then, hold their facts in a very stable place, where the evidence of their senses and their reason establish a kind of truth that is all the stronger because it is always open to revision. These truths only become more durable as evidence that would topple them fails to surface. It’s a fluid process, and one that requires reverence for nature and a respect for mysterious possibilities.

To illustrate this with my students, I like to point out that scientists and artists often operate from the same place. Entomologist and social scientist E.O. Wilson tells us: “The ideal scientist thinks like a poet and only later works like a bookkeeper. Keep in mind that innovators in both literature and science are basically dreamers and storytellers.” Nature is not just the subject of a scientist’s study; it is her inspiration as well.

I can understand why it would be hard for people to accept the truths of science if we place religion and science on opposite ends of a spectrum. If we let people believe that science is dispassionate and devoid of reverence for the things it studies, then skepticism is a little more understandable. However, if we see that reverence for nature is at the center of a scientist’s work, the truths of science and religion appear to grow from some of the same seeds.

Quaker decision making isn’t compromise, or even a search for consensus. It is a humble acceptance that solutions to our problems are nearby…

I see some clear parallels to our Quaker business practices here. Our commitment to truth drives our collective decision making, from meeting for worship for the conduct of business to clearness committees. Collective discernment depends on the surety that truth underlies all of our interactions, just waiting for us to find it. Just as there is that of God in each of us, so are there abiding truths flowing from this divine nature.

Quaker decision making isn’t compromise, or even a search for consensus. It is a humble acceptance that solutions to our problems are nearby, in a realm of divine truth that we can all discover together if we search with reverence. Although our movement toward the truth is often imperfect, Friends frequently find that the truths discovered in this way withstand the test of time.

As a Quaker science teacher, I can’t help but place Friends foundation in continuing revelation and scientists’ openness to the unfolding truths of nature side by side in my life. These two pursuits of truth deal in very different kinds of evidence, to be sure. Hard data and repeated testing are more useful in the lab than in the meetinghouse, after all.

However, in spite of their differences, to me they still belong together. The truth I receive in worship by listening for the still, small voice within doesn’t replace my reason; it is a corollary to it. It is no less valid, and just as valuable as what I gain from sensory evidence.

For me, truth is a very rich word. If I know something to be true and can refer to it as a fact, it has to have passed through some narrow places in my mind and emerged all the stronger for it. Truth is a shimmering thing, both vulnerable and strong. And although I can arrive at truths in very different ways, every truth undergirds my world in the same way.

Outside of the classroom and in the meetinghouse in particular, I need to hold fast to the sanctity of truth.

Believing as I do in this richness of truth, it is all the more galling to witness political discourse in which the telling of untruths has become common currency. There are many roads to the truth, but simply labeling something “true” because we want to isn’t one of them. And calling an outright lie an “alternative fact” isn’t just morally wrong, it undermines the whole richness of human experience. And in that richness, we find people of faith and scientists, all believing in the sanctity of truth.

Believing this, I feel a call to action. In my classroom, I teach my students to examine their thinking and to revel in the times when they realize that they are wrong and, even more so, to embrace the times when they simply do not know. I teach them that truths are often hard won, but that when they see a truth clearly, to let it live inside them. My hope is that building these habits will help let the difficult truths in, and that the evidence for truths like climate change will find fertile ground to grow in.

Outside of the classroom and in the meetinghouse in particular, I need to hold fast to the sanctity of truth. We don’t really live in a “post-fact” world; we just have many more distractions on our journey. Our call to justice is being challenged more than ever today, and, as we seek to create a better world, let us not forget that our pursuit of truth also needs to be held in the Light. I believe that Quakers are and always have been “Friends of the Truth,” and just as we stand up for each other in a difficult world, we should stand up for our friend truth as well.

]]>Our meeting is moderately sized and was founded in the middle of the twentieth century. We’re in a college town, home of a major university and several other colleges. Our meeting attracts many academics and students, and could fairly be labeled middle class. The meeting owns its meetinghouse, and 30 to 50 people attend weekly meeting for worship. In short, it is a typical college town meeting. As such🔒

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The following humorous story from the Buddhist tradition suggests that not all spiritual practices originate from divine guidance or enlightenment.

When the Zen spiritual teacher and his disciples began their evening meditation, the kitten that lived in the monastery made such noise that it distracted them. So the teacher ordered that the kitten be tied up during the evening practice. A year or so later, the teacher died, but the disciples continued the practice of tying up the cat during meditation sessions. And when the cat eventually died, another cat was brought to the monastery and tied up.

Centuries later, learned descendants of the spiritual teacher wrote scholarly treatises about the religious significance of tying up a cat for meditation practice.

This story tells a deep truth about followers of religions becoming tangled up in trivia, giving certain practices a significance never intended by the originator.

The teacher who begins tying up the cat does so for a reason specific to the situation—i.e., the kitten’s playfulness is noisy and disturbs the monks’ meditation. Even a year later when the teacher dies, the cat is still young enough to be rambunctious, so the monks continue tying it up. By the time the cat grows old and dies, say 15 years later, the older monks seem to have forgotten exactly why they tied up the cat in the first place, but they associate it with their teacher; newer disciples only know that it’s the way things have always been done at the monastery. And meditation doesn’t seem quite right unless they have a cat tied up somewhere, so they bring in a new one to continue the tradition.

Because tying up the cat has no real significance other than keeping a particular cat from disturbing meditation, the teacher never writes or teaches anything about tying up a cat, so the practice gains a kind of mystery and assumes a significance never intended by its originator. After a few centuries, “learned descendants of the spiritual teacher” write scholarly treatises about the religious significance of tying up a cat for meditation practice.

Our worship bears little resemblance to that of the original Friends. We have the original teaching and examples, but we also have several cats tied up.

Let’s apply this simple story to the practice of Quaker worship. In seventeenth-century England, Friends met in silence with no hired minister for specific reasons; for one thing, they were protesting the hand-in-glove relationship between the English state and the clergy. Meeting in silence without an official clergyman, or “hireling minister,” was a way to bypass a corrupt system and go directly to the Source itself. In a twenty-first-century democracy, care is taken to keep church and state separate, so a minister does not—cannot—represent the government. The original purpose of having worship without hired ministers is like the original purpose of having a rowdy kitten tied up: to address a specific situation that no longer exists.

At the time of the early Friends, only men who studied at Oxford or Cambridge could become ministers. George Fox taught that everyone has equal access to the Holy Spirit: no one has more than anyone else, and it was not necessary to attend a university in order to have access to the Divine. Early Friends meetings addressed this specific situation: a desire to show there was no need to follow a program laid out by seminary graduate or church liturgy. Instead, worship was to be “programmed” by the Holy Spirit, who could and did use anyone as ministers, even women, even children, even servants! (Most programmed Friends meetings today, however, prefer to hire seminary graduates, even of other denominations.)

Among contemporary Friends—both programmed and unprogrammed—our worship bears little resemblance to that of the original Friends. We have the original teaching and examples, but we also have several cats tied up.

Perhaps the most significant difference in our meetings for worship is the matter of theological unity. Early Friends all believed in the same Source (God) and used the same vocabulary to talk about it—Christian imagery and vocabulary from the Scriptures, all while acknowledging that other faiths speak in different languages about the same Source. Friends today have trouble worshiping together (in spite of the Quaker emphasis on the unity of Truth) because some Friends—in fact, some who most adamantly insist they are the only true Quakers—are offended by the words “God” and “Jesus.” Others, equally sure they are the only true Quakers, are offended by using “the Light” instead of Jesus Christ. “Tying up the cat” around language can make Friends fearful of speaking truthfully about spiritual matters and can inhibit ministry. In contrast, early Friends who spoke out of the silence could rely on their listeners hearing the Truth without having to define all their terms.

“Learned descendants” of George Fox and the early Friends have written “scholarly treatises” about the necessity of a speaker not preparing in advance, without taking into account that first Friends could recite long passages of the Bible from memory, which made them always prepared to speak of spiritual matters in ways contemporary Friends are not. Learned descendants of the early Friends write scholarly treatises that ignore the truth that we no longer read the Bible with fresh and personal insights, that our attention spans are shorter, and that the certainty of our faith is weaker.

We are all thieves, claiming their first-hand experience as our own.

Too often, Friends insist the only proper way to do Quaker worship is the way they think earlier Friends did, without being aware of (or acknowledging) specific purposes of earlier Friends that do not apply to current reality. We are all thieves, claiming their first-hand experience as our own, getting bogged down in the letter of their law, instead of seeking the spirit behind those laws.

I leave you with words from George Fox’s Letter 48, expressing a truth not tied to a specific situation or condition (there are no cats involved here):

Friends, to you all this is the Word of the Lord: take heed of judging one another. Judge not one another. . . . But every one of you in particular with the Light of Christ see yourselves, that self may be judged out with the Light in everyone. Now, all loving the Light . . . here all are in unity and no self-will can arise nor no mastery. . . . Dwelling all in the Light, which is unchangeable, you come to judge all the changeable ways and worships by that which comes from God. And with his Light . . . all those things are judged . . . dwelling in judgment thus, you will be filled full of mercy.

]]>I have suffered at the meetinghouse. There has been retribution for my faithful action, along with hypocrisy and denial. I hear the laments and regrets of many others, especially the young. We find ourselves on the outside of boundaries that we didn’t quite fully understand existed. The love of God and Friends seems very far away; it is a time of mourning and deep sadness and🔒

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An interview with Sa’ed Atshan

Sa’ed Atshan is a graduate of Ramallah Friends School in Palestine and a professor of peace and conflict studies at Swarthmore College. In October 2015, we published “Realizing Wholeness: Reflections from a Gay Palestinian Quaker,” and saw it become one of our most widely read articles of the year. Since then he’s headlined a plenary at the Friends General Conference Gathering and written for publications such as American Friends Service Committee’s Acting in Faith blog.

In person, Atshan is soft-spoken and gentle; he chooses his words with care and precision. He is generous in giving thoughtful compliments in conversations, and he seems able to find that of God in even the most obstinate political conflicts. It thus came as a surprise when he became the center of a controversy played out in the pages of Philadelphia newspapers this February. We talked to him to find out how a peace and conflict studies professor deals with controversy and to understand the discernment of a public Friend in the era of social media and instant outrage.

Do you have a short, just-the-facts kind of telling of what happened with your speaking invitation at Friends’ Central School?

Friends’ Central School in Wyndmoor, Pennsylvania, had a student group called Peace and Equality in Palestine, founded by a Jewish student. As part of the student group’s activities, they wanted to have a speaker.

The two teacher sponsors were both queer women of color, and they invited me to speak. I had never met either one of them. I was honored, and accepted. It was approved and confirmed, and we had scheduled it.

I was planning to give an uplifting talk, catered to a high school audience. And then two days before I was supposed to speak, I found out that the event had been canceled. It eventually came out that some parents had complained.

The students protested: 65 silently walked out of meeting for worship, along with their teachers. The teacher sponsors were called to meet at a diner off-campus the next morning at 7:00 a.m. and informed that the locks to their doors were changed and their email accounts shut down. They were not allowed back onto the campus.

All of this was covered in The Philadelphia Inquirer. I remained silent and didn’t engage the media at all. The Quaker world erupted, and Friends’ Central received many messages from concerned Quakers: How could a Quaker school uninvite a Quaker speaker, who’s a professor of peace studies at a Quaker college?

The school eventually apologized to me and re-invited me. I let them know that I couldn’t accept the re-invitation until the two teachers who invited me were reinstated. Instead the teachers were offered a $5,000 severance package in exchange for being silent about how they were treated. They declined that offer, and the teachers were then fired permanently.

Now the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is investigating Friends’ Central for discriminatory treatment of these teachers. It was at this point that I finally broke my silence and published an article in The Philadelphia Inquirer in which I expressed solidarity with the fired teachers.

When reached for comment, representatives from Friends’ Central School told Friends Journal: “While we understand that all individuals experience their own truth, we disagree with the fact pattern, including the timeframe, as described… Friends’ Central deeply regrets the failure of process that resulted in postponing our invitation to Sa’ed Atshan. It was never our intention to offend him. It was our intention to improve the quality of discussion of difficult topics, an important part of our mission in which we feel we are succeeding.” Friends’ Central declined to comment further on the personnel matter.
—Eds.

Tell us a little bit about the discernment that went into your public reaction. How did you decide initially to not talk? And then how did you change your mind and write the article for the newspaper?

I think one of the challenges that we face now—not just Quakers but mostly everyone, given the prevalence of social media—is the inclination to give in to knee-jerk impulses: to respond immediately whenever we feel that there’s been an injustice, whenever we feel hurt, whenever we feel pain, or whenever we feel offended.

Oftentimes, there’s an instinct—this rush—to take it to social media, to lambast the other party and publicly express one’s frustration. I really try as much as I can to be disciplined and to resist that urge. I think that going through a process of discernment—reflecting on what just happened, collecting all of the necessary information that one needs, speaking privately with key confidants, giving oneself some space and some time—can be really useful. It can allow us to engage much more productively and constructively.

I try as much as I can to be patient and not to rush to any particular mode of responding. And so that was the model that I adopted in this case. Self-discipline is especially important when it comes to airing our dirty laundry. I love Quakers, and I love being part of the Quaker community and the Quaker world.

This episode was very painful. It revealed some of the internal work that we Quakers have to do to deal with racism within our own community and to really think about who our institutions are accountable to. These are difficult conversations.

And to have some of these conversations happen outside of the Quaker world was difficult. Many people said that they used to have so much respect for Quakerism and they’d lost respect for Quakers now. I’ve had to explain that one institution doesn’t represent all Quakers. Like any faith-based community, we have our issues and struggles. You can’t write-off all Quakers based on just one episode.

So that was very painful for me, but I also had to deal with wanting to continue to represent Quakers and to communicate the beauty and value of all that we stand for. And in this instance, it was the teachers who embodied Quaker values and Quaker principles that we hold so dear.

Was there a process that you used to decide whether or not to publicly weigh in on the controversy?

I don’t want to portray myself as this selfless person, but it really wasn’t about myself. It was about the teachers. When it got to a point where my silence was being construed as equivocation instead of solidarity with the teachers, I knew I had to break my silence. They were the most vulnerable.

You know, I have a job. I have a wonderful job; I have benefits; I have a sense of stability and security. And in my position, I have tremendous support from Swarthmore College. I’m very blessed.

The teachers at Friends’ Central School don’t have a union. They don’t have a tenure track or a tenure system. They’re deeply vulnerable, as we saw. And so given that they experienced what they experienced as a result of inviting me to speak, I felt a moral responsibility. The least I could do was express that solidarity publicly.

This was an example of the tension between free speech versus controversial speech. How do you come down on balancing these?

My concern is the slippery slope. People may oppose the free speech of one party, and then all of a sudden find their own free speech violated. You’re now next on the list, you know? And we see that kind of boomerang effect. We see that time and again.

I truly do believe in the free marketplace of ideas. I believe that people have a conscience and a moral compass that can guide them. I don’t feel threatened at all by points of view that are different from mine.

Sometimes it is painful to hear hate speech. Time and again, we hear vitriolic homophobic speech that’s incredibly dehumanizing to LGBTQ people. And as a gay person, it’s very painful for me to hear that. But at the same time, I don’t think that the solution is somehow to muzzle those who speak in a dehumanizing way. I think the solution is to speak: How do we make a case that’s more compelling? How do we engage young people? How do we engage religious communities on these issues and get them to understand where we’re coming from?

And so I think that approach is much more sustainable and more enduring in the long run.

Even Friends can resort to stereotypes when it comes to our internal conflicts. How do we find our voice when we see someone being mischaracterized?

Stereotyping is very easy. As human beings, we need categories. We need them in our linguistic and conceptual toolbox. Using categories, it’s much easier to process the world around us and to communicate.

But sometimes we don’t realize the harm and the danger involved in associating people with a particular label. I see this in our relations with Friends United Meeting (FUM); in some situations, we just roll our eyes.

I have deep respect for the work of FUM. I’m a product of Ramallah Friends School, which has been supported by FUM since the 1800s. I am also frustrated with some of FUM’s policies, such as those restricting openly LGBTQ people from working as staff. But my critique doesn’t diminish my overall respect for FUM.

It’s easy for us in the world aligned with the more liberal Friends General Conference to stereotype everyone in the FUM world. We’re all fellow Quakers and have a lot that we can learn from each other. It’s problematic for us to just write-off an entire community and subpopulation of Quakers with one label—and a label that has all of these associations that we’ve attached to it.

It would be wonderful if we were more curious about each other and if we wanted to dig deeper beyond labels. We should be more willing to engage groups directly and ask them how they self-identify. What is their worldview? If we took the time to do this, we would see that the points of commonality are incredible.

It’s a clichéd observation that Friends will sometimes go out of our way to avoid conflict, even to the point of looking away from bullying behavior. How do we muster the courage to step up and be allies, even within our community?

Part of our Quaker heritage is speaking truth to power. Quakers have been at the forefront of many social justice struggles. Now Quakerism is morphing increasingly into a community of individuals who think that to be a pacifist, to see the light of God in every human being, and to be committed to our peace testimony requires us to actively avoid conflict and any form of confrontation. Confrontation or conflict is misconstrued as a form of violence.

That is disconcerting. In peace and conflict studies, we teach our students to embrace conflict. We teach our students that conflict is important and we should not avoid it. It’s the way we resolve our differences and address our misunderstandings or disagreements. But it’s important to raise conflict in a way that transforms it.

When instead we avoid conflict, we become passive aggressive, and the underlying issues continue to simmer. That can lead to violent conflict—or at least much more pain in the long run. So embracing conflict and learning to be comfortable with discomfort is a challenge facing Quakers. We have a lot of work to do in that regard.

Where do you find hope in the midst of conflict?

In this interview, we have focused a lot on the challenges that we face. There have been a number of critiques that have come up, and we addressed some incredibly sensitive, thorny, and difficult issues that don’t have easy answers.

First, thinking through these questions is part of a lifelong journey and will take experimentation, patience, and humility. I acknowledge that I have many more questions than answers.

Second, my spirit and soul are sustained by Quakers: the community that we forge and the relationships that we build. The egalitarian spaces that we strive to create and the love that we share with each other and with the world keeps us going in these challenging moments. I don’t want to take for granted the ordinary, everyday acts of kindness, compassion, love, and joy in the Quaker world.

It’s the moment when I’m sitting in Central Philadelphia Meeting on a Sunday and we’re at worship. Fifteen minutes before the closing of worship, the children and the Sunday school teacher are preparing to enter the worship space. They sing a song together to collect themselves and to alert us that they are entering. Just to hear them and then to see them come in—they add light and joy, and their energy just fills the room—makes my heart sing.

These special moments of Quakerism give me the strength and the willpower to renew the work that all of us do collectively. They renew my commitment to social justice work that comes from a place of love. It’s so easy for us to get caught up in polemical issues with their slogans and grand debates, but it’s important not to lose sight of these very ordinary acts we Quakers do that take on a really profound significance in the world we live in.

]]>https://www.friendsjournal.org/challenges-face-community-forge/feed/03028234The Transformation of a Small Quaker Libraryhttps://www.friendsjournal.org/transformation-small-quaker-library/
https://www.friendsjournal.org/transformation-small-quaker-library/#respondWed, 01 Nov 2017 07:50:57 +0000https://www.friendsjournal.org/?p=3027848Bringing a new sense of purpose to an underused meeting library. 🔒 Friends Journal Member? Sign in here! Not an FJ member? To read this piece, please join us today! For $28, you'll get: A year of Friends Journal delivered to your mailbox (11 issues) and email Full, instant access to the world’s largest online library of […]

]]>Corvallis Meeting in Oregon is a small but vibrant unprogrammed meeting, with a Sunday attendance of 20 to 25 worshipers. I first showed up at the end of October 2004, with only a slight acquaintance with Quakerism. I was seeking peace and quiet after moving with my husband across the country from🔒

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]]>https://www.friendsjournal.org/transformation-small-quaker-library/feed/03027848Meeting with Friends in an Old Libraryhttps://www.friendsjournal.org/meeting-friends-old-library/
https://www.friendsjournal.org/meeting-friends-old-library/#respondWed, 01 Nov 2017 07:45:26 +0000https://www.friendsjournal.org/?p=3027861A visitor settles down at the library table at Beacon Hills Friends House. 🔒 Friends Journal Member? Sign in here! Not an FJ member? To read this piece, please join us today! For $28, you'll get: A year of Friends Journal delivered to your mailbox (11 issues) and email Full, instant access to the world’s largest online […]

]]>The north windows are at my back, and the south windows are in front of me. I’m sitting at a long library table at Beacon Hill Friends House in Boston. What an unexpected delight to be in this library and in this very old house with the very old books!
Across the Boston Common🔒

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Popular stereotypes hold both Quaker meetinghouses and libraries to be quiet, often historical places of refuge with dust motes and stern yet friendly human residents. The first documented image of a “shushing librarian” in American film is a Quaker librarian portrayed in The Philadelphia Story from 1940. Both Quakers and librarians are seen as discerning and helpful to others but a bit separate from the everyday noise of the modern world. Where do these stereotypes come from, and are they still true today?

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Stereotypes by their very nature often contain some kernel of truth. Some meetings and libraries are dusty ancient places for quiet and are often cherished for these very attributes. But is fulfilling a sense of nostalgia what we are being called to do in the present? If not, how might we balance the tensions at play and open our institutions to new opportunities? A possible case study is the current evolution of one library that is part of a Quaker heritage institution. Guilford College’s Hege Library in Greensboro, North Carolina, is transforming from a twentieth-century library touting the number of items held to a twenty-first century library branded as an academic commons nurturing connections and collaboration.

Guilford College was founded as New Garden Boarding School and began 180 years ago in August 1837. The first book in the institution’s library was a copy of Robert Barclay’s An Apology for the True Christian Divinity (first published in 1678). Bibles, George Fox’s Journal, other Quaker texts and writings pertaining to Scripture were among the first books in those early years, along with texts on grammar and arithmetic. Perhaps with the exception of grammar and arithmetic titles, these early publications are familiar ones to most nineteenth-century Quaker libraries, and older meetings will likely find many of the same editions tucked away on their own bookshelves. As the school grew and the curriculum expanded to offer a more thorough classical preparatory education, the library grew and expanded to meet those needs. Quaker memoirs, journals, disciplines, and core writings of early Friends were joined by non-Quaker histories, biographies, philosophy, and religion as well as science publications (poetry and literature came along to join them about a generation later). Over time, the expansion continued to support the growing standards for an academic library as the boarding school transitioned into a four-year college. A beautiful Carnegie Library was constructed in 1909 to house the library’s book collections and to serve as a space for student study and research overseen by Quaker librarian Julia White.

Fast-forward a century later: student information needs and expectations, as well as how we all access and use information, have changed dramatically. Libraries need to be much more than quiet sanctuaries housing an ever-growing number of books. Many have been much more than that for decades, but the focus of visitors often still tends to be a question about the number of books owned by the library rather than deeper questions about the learning experiences nurtured within the space.

Guilford’s Hege Library was poised for a new era and sought to discern where it needed to be through an intensive strategic-planning process. The executive summary of the complete plan states:

We believe in the library’s central importance as a dynamic physical learning environment. We celebrate the library’s re-envisioning, which extends its role beyond one of knowledge repository to interactive learning laboratory.

In the three years since plan approval, a transformation has occurred—not just of physical space but also of operations and identity—as Guilford’s library incorporates academic technologies more fully into its responsibilities and seeks to cultivate collaborative opportunities by intentionally inviting academic partners to co-locate within the physical space. The root of the mission remains the same as educators committed to our students’ learning. However, it has evolved to make use of new tools and expanded to encourage closer cross-campus collaboration.

Guilford’s library planning process received encouragement along the way. We approached our process using the strengths-based strategy grounded in the Appreciative Inquiry model developed in the 1980s by David Cooperrider and Suresh Srivastva at Case Western Reserve University. Rather than seeking out weaknesses and threats, we sought to identify opportunities and aspirations. We recognized that changes would be difficult for some. This was made easier by offering regular opportunities for communication and by remaining open to listening where words might be coming from so that we could work through points of tension. Choices had to be made as we decided to lay down some traditional activities and reduce overall collection size, as needs for newer services were identified. Each of these junctures provided an opportunity to reflect back on our core mission. Was something being maintained out of habit or because it remained useful for the community? If we chose to maintain something not originally on our priority list but held as a preference by a few, would that hinder implementation of a more recently identified essential need?

Libraries and books are something many hold dear. It can be painful to reduce the size of a physical collection. However, I have found my experience to be one of joyful pruning that creates opportunities for new growth. This is the right season for Guilford’s library to do some major pruning. The accession logs listing all the books placed in the library when the current building first opened in 1908 and the successive additions in later decades are preserved in the college archives so we can learn what resources our students used in the past without keeping each volume. The spaces created by shifting books are now an innovative collaborative classroom and additional student study spaces. The books that remain on open shelves are easier to browse, and those most useful jump out now that they are no longer hidden among the many less-used items. Our closed shelves have been greatly expanded to provide additional space for archival materials that are truly rare or unique to Guilford’s Quaker heritage. Our library’s collection is in the process of being revitalized, and our library, both as a building and as an organization, has been transformed.

The visioning process of our library could perhaps be held up as a model for meetings and other Quaker institutions. Are there new tools to consider and collaborations to nurture beyond Friends’ traditional borders? Do we let others (or a few individuals) define Quakerism based on past assumptions, or do we grapple as a meeting community with deeper questions about what Quakerism means to us in this particular time and place? Who do we include as our partners? What are we called to do as a community? Are we only preserving a past, or are we growing and living into a space that more fully develops our potential gifts as Friends?

Bonus online feature from the author: “Escaping the Dusty Bookcase”

Author Gwen Gosney Erickson provides a list of queries for meetings to discern how and why they might maintain a meeting library. One intriguing suggestion is to separate the meeting library from a meeting history room. Read this and more online features on the theme of “Quaker Libraries” at Friendsjournal.org/online.

Nonviolent action campaigns are waged all over the world. Above is a distribution of the campaigns across the globe (map via nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu).

You are the salt of the earth. But if salt loses its savor, how will it be made salty again? (Matthew 5:13)

When Jesus told the crowd gathered to hear the Sermon on the Mount that they were the salt of the earth, he was speaking to people familiar with the challenges of living under a brutal and oppressive government, one that was in service to power and wealth, and cared little for the poor. Fortunately, we are not in Roman-occupied Palestine, but the dynamics of oppression don’t differ that much across cultures. We are now in a political situation that is increasingly dangerous and is likely to get worse. I’ve been voting in presidential elections for almost 50 years, and although many of my preferred candidates lost, I never thought that the very institutions of democracy were at risk. Now I can almost hear the cracking of the foundations. If I’m hearing something real and our new president turns out to be as destructive as I think he is, we are in quite a stew, and it’s going to need some careful seasoning.

How to live faithfully in challenging times—what to think, how to pray, what to do—has never been an easy problem. It’s a three-legged stool: thinking, praying, and acting are all essential. Liberation theologians call this the praxis of theology. Careful thought, serious prayer, and considered action make up the wholeness of faith. Each leg of the stool doing its work makes it possible for the other two to do theirs.

First, let’s think together about the big picture of political systems and how nonviolence works. If every Quaker meeting had a study group exploring the history, strategies, and specific methods of nonviolent action, the dynamics of people power would come into view in a very empowering way. Fortunately, there are wonderful resources easily available. The writings of Gene Sharp, master strategist and theorist of nonviolence, are available through the Albert Einstein Institution (aeinstein.org). The Global Nonviolent Action Database (nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu) maintained by Swarthmore College is an extraordinary resource with a growing number of case studies. Websites promoting and teaching nonviolence abound, including one of my favorites, Waging Nonviolence (wagingnonviolence.org). There are even TED talks that teach the dynamics of nonviolence (search “nonviolence” at ted.com/talks). On the one hand, I can get very discouraged and anxious about our political future, but on the other, I know that never before in history has the extraordinary power of nonviolence been so widely studied, taught, and practiced. That gives me immense hope. Jesus was helping the people recognize a basic truth. We are the seasoning. But if we don’t know that, if we don’t know our own power, then the stew doesn’t get the seasoning it needs. So let’s be salt. If you haven’t already, please go look up resources on nonviolence and begin to learn its methods and strategies. Then share what you learn with your neighbors, and find a piece of this puzzle you can all agree to work on. Nonviolence is our future, our whole future. Without it, we won’t have one.

I have found that regular discipline in prayer ultimately cracks open my assumptions about the nature of self and world. The Divine Comforter is also a Divine Disturber who relentlessly overthrows the internalized regime of my idols.

If you travel in Quaker circles, I’m sure this isn’t the first time you’ve heard this advice. But there is another aspect to it that I believe is just as critical and a profound source of hope. It is this: The very same dynamics of nonviolence that bring about transformation in the political world are also at work in the inner world. The nonviolence model can also revolutionize how we understand prayer, the second leg of the stool. We are accustomed to thinking of prayer as a place of comfort, and certainly it is that. We are accustomed to the idea that prayer grounds and seasons our outward action, that it refreshes the soul and prepares us to return to the fields of outward engagement. That too is important. But there is yet another critical feature of this leg of the stool that we sometimes fail to consider: prayer itself is a transformational process both in the inner world of the one who prays and in its outward fruits. Transformational work crosses the inward–outward barrier; it may even erase it. Prayer is essential to the praxis of faith because prayer is itself a field of engagement.

I know this is a bold claim: prayer is, within its own dynamic and apart from outward action, a type of intervention. There are obvious problems with this claim. Karl Marx named the biggest one: religion (when it is reduced to mere piety) is an opiate, drugging us into complacency. I’m not talking about piety. Here’s another problem: prayer is often taken to mean a type of pleading, an appeal for special intervention. I’m not talking about a request for outside help. Now, here is another: prayer is imagined as being exclusively inward, going to the Well, or a return to Sanctuary. Prayer is a refueling station. This one may be closer to home for many of us Quakers. It is supported in much of our literature, such as in Thomas Kelly’s wonderful line, “Deep within us all there is an amazing inner sanctuary of the soul.” Further on in A Testament of Devotion, however, in a passage that could be easily overlooked, he laments the necessities of time: “linear sequence and succession of words is our inevitable lot and compels us to treat separately what is not separate.” Kelly, like many earlier Quakers, had awakened to an interconnected world.

We Quakers are children of the Enlightenment. We were born into a world that was already defined for us before we got here. Like Kelly, we submit to the necessities of our inward–outward language, but we do not have to accept the worldview it enshrines. I have found that regular discipline in prayer ultimately cracks open my assumptions about the nature of self and world. The Divine Comforter is also a Divine Disturber who relentlessly overthrows the internalized regime of my idols. There is a peace and a deep quietness that comes, but it is on the other side of God’s nonviolent revolution of the soul. Small wonder that Margaret Fell warned that the Divine Encounter “will rip you up and tear you open.” Prayer is serious business if we are willing to submit to its alchemy.

Shortly after World War II, in the rise of the atomic age, the Swiss analytical psychologist C.G. Jung was asked during a discussion at the Psychology Club Zurich if he thought the world could avoid atomic war. His answer was intriguing, and classic Jung. He said, “I think it depends on how many people can stand the tension of the opposites in themselves.” What a beautiful and wise response! Not only is Jung directing us to the essential inner work that must season our outward engagements, he is also calling us to awaken to the extraordinary reality of the collective unconscious, the web of interbeing that is hidden from eyes trained to see only the surfaces of things. When Jung speaks of this kind of inner work, he is talking about a depth that reaches beyond the individual psyche and engages ways of seeing and experiencing that are inaccessible to Western, Cartesian eyes. Jung was thoroughly persuaded that the modern worldview was much too limited. He became fascinated with Native American worldviews; he learned from Elgonyi elders in central Africa, and pored over ancient texts from around the world. One of his students and interpreters, James Hillman, has taken Jung’s work and pushed it further toward what many writers are now calling an ecology of soul. He calls for a “return of soul to the world.” Hillman’s challenge is that we liberate soul from its entrapment in the lonely and isolated prison created by a worldview that is blind to our essential interrelatedness.

Most of us trust the power of prayer implicitly despite being trapped in a worldview that doesn’t allow us to see how it could possibly make a difference. We “hold each other in the Light” and trust that it matters that we do so. Most of us also have stories of openings, resolutions of difficulties, even physical healings that we may not talk about for fear of being thought naïve, gullible, or worse. It’s time we gave up our shyness about such things. Prayer matters. Serious and committed inner work not only prepares us for faithful outward action, it is itself a type of engagement. As Walter Wink writes in his extraordinarily important work Engaging the Powers, “history belongs to the intercessors.” If in addition to study groups learning about nonviolence, every meeting also had committed prayer groups, holding our country in the Light, we would be adding another essential leg to the stool. We are not just refueling in order to return to a field of engagement, we are showing up for the Divine Encounter, presenting ourselves as willing subjects for transformation and as willing instruments for transformation in the world. Prayer has a way of shifting not only how we see the world but also how we see ourselves. We are called to love the world as we have been loved, to confront the world as we have been confronted, to forgive as we have been forgiven, and to be instruments of its healing as we ourselves have been healed. Only the forgiven truly know how to forgive, and only the healed know how to heal. Prayer restores savor to the salt; it returns us to our essential nature. As saltiness is the essential nature of salt, so is ours the Indwelling Spirit. Grace is the ground of our being and the source of our hope.

Seasoned in prayer and schooled in the dynamics of nonviolence, the action leg of the stool is likely to be much more thoughtfully considered and well discerned. The form of our action may be protest, witness, compassionate accompaniment, civil disobedience, or any number of other possible interventions. But whatever form it takes, its underlying purpose and strategy will be in the service of healing. Nonviolence, like prayer, seeks transformation, a re-ordering of the system toward justice and a creative, dynamic peace. It is not unlike what I try to work at in my pastoral counseling practice. What if we were to imagine our country as a suffering patient? We would approach it with compassion, and we would tend to it with a plan of treatment that is based on thoughtful diagnosis. We would observe the symptoms and seek to understand the underlying dynamic of the illness. One of Jung’s greatest contributions was to show us that the symptom is a teacher, a trailhead leading into depths, that faithfully attended will reveal the soul in all its broken beauty.

We are alternately anxious and then angry, frantically searching for solid ground, some way to deal with our painful symptoms. Finding none, we fall into despair.

American biblical scholar, theologian, and activist Walter Wink.

A few years ago, I had the privilege of working with a wonderful client; she was very committed to her faith, conservative both politically and theologically, frightened by the reports she heard from her friends and Fox News, and wanting pastoral support for listening for guidance. We worked with a variety of modalities, principally dream work. After a number of months, she brought in a dream in which she found herself on a train, riding with the president. Then, to her dismay, she was given a bowl of water and a cloth and was told that her task was to go and wash President Obama’s feet. To her credit, she carried out her assignment and allowed the dream to inform her life. She did not significantly change her political leanings, but her life was now “seasoned” with the compensatory wisdom of soul. Her anxiety was considerably lessened, and she gained an increased capacity to participate in a highly polarized political climate with the added stability that her inner work provided. Now, more than a year after she finished her work with me, I can almost hear her friendly challenge: “Dan, are you able to wash Donald Trump’s feet?” It’s a challenge I take seriously. When I listen for the ecological strivings of my own soul, I hear a call to hold my own judgments and anxiety with tenderness, a call to embrace the shadow that I all too easily disown and project onto our new president.

It’s not all shadow projection, of course. I still believe that he can cause real and significant harm. But I want to clear myself of my reactivity to him and to find the humility to release my judgments of people who voted for him. I want to be able to listen and engage across difference. It is likely that we are going to need broad-based communities of resistance, coalitions that bridge divides that would otherwise simply fall into further polarization. In our age of heightened anxiety, our country is like a client who lives with split-off fragments in the psyche producing dramatic instability. We are alternately anxious and then angry, frantically searching for solid ground, some way to deal with our painful symptoms. Finding none, we fall into despair, only to renew the cycle of unfocused action and depressive inaction. A split psyche can lead to breakdown and further chaos, but it can also lead to breakthrough. What Jung called the “transcendent function” emerges to awaken the psyche to a new orientation that is grounded in a deeper center, with horizons wide enough to hold the formerly polarized opposites in a new and more inclusive whole. Parts and complexes are healed of their extreme positions, and the client experiences a new and more harmonious integration. Once the suffering client experiences the creative advance inherent in the pattern of “breakdown and breakthrough,” it becomes a little easier to trust the dynamics of transformation. Like the individual psyche, so also communities of faith, and even whole countries, need this kind of ongoing nonviolent revolution.

Many of us are struggling to get our bearings in this new and troubling political situation. It is tempting to grasp after a restoration of the old structure. But there is another, more hopeful way to look at where we are. When things are out of balance, there is a wisdom that lives deep within that will bring to light what needs healing and that offers an opportunity for creative advance. If we awaken to the challenge, we will bring all three legs of the stool into our praxis of faith. We will learn, teach, and practice the extraordinary power of nonviolence. We will shed worn out ideas about prayer that are too small for the soul, and we will act with healing wisdom and hope. If we attend to these everyday disciplines, we will rise to the challenge of the Sermon on the Mount. We will take to heart its teaching and become salt in this stew.

]]>https://www.friendsjournal.org/nonviolence-teaching/feed/23027317God Still Speaks to the Quakershttps://www.friendsjournal.org/drone-protest/
https://www.friendsjournal.org/drone-protest/#commentsSun, 01 Oct 2017 08:30:25 +0000https://www.friendsjournal.org/?p=3027380A group of activists from many faith traditions work together to protest drone warfare. 🔒 Friends Journal Member? Sign in here! Not an FJ member? To read this piece, please join us today! For $28, you'll get: A year of Friends Journal delivered to your mailbox (11 issues) and email Full, instant access to the world’s largest […]

]]>The banner read: “If Herod had drones, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph would have been incinerated!” On Friday, December 23, 2016, our Nativity tableau stood at the entrance to Hancock Field Air National Guard Base in Mattydale, New York, near Syracuse. Soon my three friends and I🔒

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]]>https://www.friendsjournal.org/drone-protest/feed/13027380An AFSC Defense of the Rights of Consciencehttps://www.friendsjournal.org/conscientious-objection-seeger/
https://www.friendsjournal.org/conscientious-objection-seeger/#commentsSun, 01 Oct 2017 08:25:54 +0000https://www.friendsjournal.org/?p=3027386The Case of the United States of America vs. Daniel A. Seeger

The author (left) in AFSC’s New York Metro Regional Office, with Jerald Ciekot and J. Collett. Photo courtesy of AFSC Archives.

On March 8, 1965, the United States Supreme Court greatly expanded the number of American citizens qualified for classification as conscientious objectors to military service. It did this by striking down the requirement that a conscientious objector must affirm belief in a Supreme Being and must derive his conscientious claim from that belief.

Fifty-two years have elapsed since the rendering of the verdict in the case of United States v. Seeger. I am, perhaps, the least qualified to reflect on its meaning on account of being too personally involved in the matter. With the current uncertain political situation and the prospect of an endless “war on terrorism” looming, a reflection, however inconclusive and possibly flawed, must begin somewhere.

Daniel A. Seeger. Photo courtesy of AFSC Archives.

When I wrote to my draft board requesting exemption from military service because of my deeply held pacifist convictions, I was an unchurched youth, having drifted away from the Roman Catholicism of my family and into agnosticism. The draft board sent me a conscientious objector form to fill out, and the first question on the form was “Do you believe in a Supreme Being?” followed by a check box for a “yes” answer and another for a “no” answer. I was startled to be asked such a question by an agency of the government, but having no wish to dissemble—most especially on a matter so close to my deepest convictions—and having no awareness of the legal consequences of what I was doing, I drew a third check box, next to which I wrote, “Please see attached pages.” I had submitted with the form an eight-page personal essay on the ability and the inability to know God.

The religious test was first mandated by section 6(j) of the Universal Military Training and Service Act of 1948. In adopting the Supreme Being test for conscientious objectors, Congress was seeking to address a problem which arises in both law and economics: the “free-rider problem,” more commonly referred to as “draft dodging” with regard to the draft. How can society address the issue of people who benefit from a public good while not contributing to the effort? The law was intended to sift out authentic conscientious objectors from people who opted out merely because of a preference for their own convenience over the needs of the nation.

The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States guarantees citizens freedom of religion. It stipulates that the government shall not interfere with the free exercise of religious practice, and it also proscribes the government from behaving in a way that prefers, or “establishes,” a particular faith or group of faiths over others. The main argument in my defense was that Congress, in requiring affirmative belief in a Supreme Being as a prerequisite for exemption from military service, was preferring people of some religious beliefs over people of other religious beliefs or with no religious belief, thereby violating the “disestablishment clause” of the First Amendment to the Constitution.

Fifty-two years after the Supreme Court decision, I remain convinced that we are better off acknowledging that we face great and awesome mysteries about our origins and about life and death than we are by claiming to know too much.

When I was single-handedly, and unsuccessfully, attempting to get classified as a conscientious objector in spite of my unorthodox religious views, a college friend finally said to me: “You had better look up the Quakers; they might be able to help you.” I looked up the Quakers in the yellow pages—a paperback directory of local telephone numbers and addresses that existed back in those days—and I found my way to the New York City office of American Friends Service Committee (AFSC).

At that time, most members of the Religious Society of Friends were routinely receiving their conscientious objector classification. But in the course of their work for peace, Friends and AFSC staff were encountering people whom they regarded as sincere objectors to war but who were being denied exemption on the basis of this dogmatic religious test. They ended up either in jail, fleeing the country, or serving in spite of their convictions. So the impulse to try to change things was natural for many Friends.

Robert Gilmore, who was then in charge of the office, looked over my documents and quickly recognized both the impossibility of my claim, in terms of the law as it then presently stood, and the opportunity it presented for launching a case challenging the law. He was promptly on the telephone with Colin Bell, AFSC’s head of staff, and George Willoughby, who at that time served as the executive secretary of the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors. As a result of the collaboration of these three Friends, Kenneth Greenawalt was recruited to serve on a pro bono basis as chief attorney, and a defense fund was organized.

Taking on my case was an act of courage and vision on the part of these three Friends, and most particularly on the part of Colin Bell, who bore overall responsibility for AFSC’s mission and well-being. The chance that an effort in the courts would result in the overturning of a key provision of the Universal Military Training and Service Act of 1948 was a small one. AFSC in those days was supported by a broad array of Friends of diverse theological views, and many of AFSC’s constituents were skeptical of, if not hostile to, associating with “godlessness,” and thus to the expenditure of time, effort, and resources in this connection.

The government’s argument was that my beliefs were not religious but were merely philosophical, or merely a personal moral code, and that the religious freedom protections of the First Amendment need not be extended to me. The United States Supreme Court, in unanimously deciding the issue in my favor, defined the term “religion” broadly enough to include my unchurched agnostic perspective.

When our challenge was launched in the late 1950s, no one had any idea that a war was in our future. By the time the case was decided in 1965, the first stages of the Vietnam War were underway, and the catastrophe was rapidly escalating into a major national crisis. Conscription meant that many thousands of individuals and families were impacted by the war policy—and by the Seeger case. To this day, I still meet people who, when they’ve learned my name, exclaim that my case was the reason they did not have to go to Vietnam, or to jail, or to Canada.

As a result of the case, many conscientious objectors with unorthodox religious beliefs were enabled to do alternative service instead of joining the military. The case did, nevertheless, have its limitations. I was (and am) an absolute pacifist; that is, I am opposed to all wars in any form. So the decision in my case allowed only those who opposed all wars to qualify for alternative service. Although I disagree with people who think that some wars can be justified, I fail to see why, because one regards some wars as necessary, one loses one’s right to decline to serve in a war one sees as unjustified or foolish. There are many wars in U.S. history, from the invasion of Mexico to the Iraq War, that do not pass any reasonable “just war” test.

I believe I can honestly say that the movement in the heart of compassion for those who suffer in wars first motivated me to file my conscientious claim. Later came the strong sense that war cannot achieve any decent political or social goal, and that its cost is never commensurate with its results.

Today I would express my concern more broadly. True peace requires compassion not only for humanity but for the entire biotic community that inhabits planet Earth. True peace will come only when we learn to live in gracious harmony with the animals and plants that are part of Earth’s normally balanced ecological system. If we were to destroy Earth’s many species and their habitats, we certainly would destroy the human estate itself. But a true decency of spirit will sense a reverence and a love for the community of nature, and not seek to preserve it merely for self-interest. We see this enlargement of spirit beginning to take hold among some of our fellow citizens in their restoring monarch butterflies and communities of wolves and dolphins. In the meantime, the degradation of the Earth and the loss of such resources as pure water become the seeds of future wars.

The job that is given to us—we did not choose it—is to lay the foundations for a new civilization. This is a task not to be undertaken with sadness, resignation, anxiety, or desperation, for that would taint the result.

Fifty-two years after the Supreme Court decision, I remain convinced that we are better off acknowledging that we face great and awesome mysteries about our origins and about life and death than we are by claiming to know too much. We can develop a reverence for what is sacred without making extravagant dogmatic claims—claims that always flaunt and fail. While I have become an avid reader of devotional literature from Christian and other traditions and have met many God-fearing people whose purity of spirit has been truly uplifting, I am also increasingly wary of the dangers of religious fanaticism, an age-old problem in every spiritual culture and one which manifests itself with particular virulence today.

I am equally wary of dogmatic atheists. It is only in recent times that whole societies have been organized on atheistic principles, as in the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. There is little to inspire confidence there.

That reason and empirical observation will eventually solve all the mysteries of existence, a claim made by some of the “new atheists” in Europe and the United States, strikes me as extraordinarily naïve. Every deductive reasoning process begins from some un-premised first premise: some sort of stipulated initial principle for which no further underlying justification can be sought. And regarding ethics, it is impossible to argue from what is to what ought to be following scientific and rational procedures, frequent claims to the contrary notwithstanding.

The scientific view of reality is certainly less emotionally and intellectually satisfying than that which is given in the Book of Genesis. We are to believe that a big bang magically emerged from some sort of nothingness, that space is curved, time elastic, and that we change something merely by observing it. Most of the matter in the universe is invisible matter, or dark matter, determined to be there and exerting gravitational force, because if it weren’t, the universe would not behave as we observe it to do. Space itself is expanding even though there is nothing for it to expand into. String theory now proposes that there are many parallel universes. Thus, scientific hypotheses (they can hardly be called discoveries) tend to raise many more questions than they solve. Is it not clear that we are dealing with limitations in the human perceptual apparatus? We are like goldfish trying to figure out the economy of the household based on observations made from inside a bowl, or lobsters speculating about fire.

We do know that we are the stuff of stars, that this universe through some mysterious creative process generated us, and that we have a kinship with all that exists. As legend has it, Francis of Assisi recognized this when he sang of Brother Sun and Sister Moon. Jesus recognized this when, in the Gospel of John, he prayed “[t]hat they all may be one”(17:21). Religious people who acknowledge that all speech about God is misleading and secularists who nevertheless have mystical experiences in which they feel the exaltation of a loving sense of unity with all that exists are not that far apart.

So, although we are surrounded by mystery, we also, happily, live in an island of light. The most worthwhile endeavor the human spirit can address today is the search for a way in which decency and humanity can be identified and defended in an uncommonly degraded age. We know we live in a time of profound transition—a time when the world’s habitual way of doing things has outlived its usefulness, has exhausted itself, and is foundering on its own internal contradictions. The job that is given to us—we did not choose it—is to lay the foundations for a new civilization. This is a task not to be undertaken with sadness, resignation, anxiety, or desperation, for that would taint the result. Rather, it should be addressed with joy, confidence, and hope. Truth is never without its witnesses; there are always people who are discriminating and independent, yet communicative and responsive, and willing to join with others in the decent management of our common human affairs. We must persevere in our work, planting seeds whose fruits we will not live to see. The arc of history is unmistakable: Whatever good things folly threatens to dissolve will, over the very long run, be restored through the practices of reconciliation and love.

]]>https://www.friendsjournal.org/conscientious-objection-seeger/feed/53027386Why Talk about Conscientious Objection with Youth?https://www.friendsjournal.org/military-draft/
https://www.friendsjournal.org/military-draft/#commentsSun, 01 Oct 2017 08:20:29 +0000https://www.friendsjournal.org/?p=3027458Conscience must be developed and nurtured.

As a witness for peace in Fayetteville, North Carolina, home of Fort Bragg (the largest base of military personnel), we at Quaker House see the winds of war on the horizon long before the rest of the country does. Through our GI Rights Hotline and Domestic Violence in the Military counselors and through our presentations, we see the invisible wounds of war: post-traumatic stress disorder, moral injury, and domestic violence. These are the wounds too many of our service members suffer, particularly when the conscience re-awakens to the realities of war.

We are often asked why we work with teens considering conscientious objection. The answer is two-fold: first, we are developing a conscientious objection to war to safeguard them in case a draft is ever reinstated. We would prefer to prepare for an event that may never happen than to be unprepared. The second response, however, is more important: we are nurturing a conscientious commitment to peace, or a testimony of nonviolence, that the young people carry with them into adulthood. Articulating and discerning a stance as a conscientious objector (CO) has both immediate and long-range benefits. It develops a young person’s conscience in meaningful and lasting ways.

We live in a war-illiterate nation. Nationalism is at a high point. We are at war in seven nations and rattle our sabers at others. We have nearly 800 military bases worldwide. The federal budget for the military peaked in 2010, but it is still far too high with a 2017 projected budget of $582 billion. Legislation has been introduced to require women to register for Selective Service. Repeated deployments and stop-loss involuntary extensions of a service member’s active duty service strain both active duty and reserve personnel. Talk of reinstating a military draft gets louder.

Then, sadly, our conscientious objector heroes from previous wars are passing away. These role models represented a living, historical testimony to deeply held convictions. Some went to jail; others fled the country, while some were able to perform alternative service as a way of serving their country. Unfortunately, their voices and living memories are being forgotten as their generation passes away.

Selective Service registration has evolved into an automatic, seamless process. Most teens do not even realize they are being registered because in almost all states Selective Service registration is now linked to an application for a driver’s license.

More than ever, talking about conscientious objection with our youth is exactly what we should be doing.

Has our collective conscience been anesthetized to the realities and implications of our nation’s militarism? Are we losing a core aspect of the peace testimony and the opportunity to explore a path of peace among our youth?

Is conscientious objection fading away from our Quaker consciousness?

Several years ago at a Quaker yearly meeting where I conducted a workshop on conscientious objection, I asked young Friends why they signed up for the session. Their response was universal: “I know conscientious objection is a part of the Quaker peace testimony, so I figured I should learn something about it!”

The session was lively and engaging. The young Friends learned about conscientious objection, explored their beliefs, role-played them before a mock draft board, and understood how they could start articulating and documenting their convictions in a “CO letter.”

Given this enthusiasm, a similar workshop was offered to adults the following year. When asked why they took the workshop, they responded in an equally surprising way: “I’ve been trying to get our meeting to teach our young people about conscientious objection, but no one is interested.”

These two occasions are typical, even in the historic peace churches. How can this be? It was Quakers who in 1656 brought conscientious objection to the New World, and since then, Quakers and other like-minded faiths fought to have it recognized within military legislation. Men of conviction died in prison instead of being part of a war machine. Why is a sense of urgency not part of today’s public purview? Has our collective conscience been anesthetized to the realities and implications of our nation’s militarism? Is it only the 1 percent who serve in the armed forces who are affected by war? Are we losing a core aspect of the peace testimony and the opportunity to explore a path of peace among our youth who are tomorrow’s leaders? These questions are particularly relevant and worth a closer look at Selective Service and how it affects our young people.

Selective Service in a nutshell

Selective Service is very much alive and well. It is part of the federal budget and an independent agency of the executive branch. It has a large and efficient staff, a polished website, and a huge public relations program. It seeks to register virtually every 18-year-old male (and soon every female) living in the United States, including undocumented immigrants.

In essence, the Selective Service System is a draft “ready to go.” Its ultimate purpose is to deliver manpower in case of a war. In non-draft times, it is a registry that holds the name, address, birthdate, and social security number of young men (and possibly women in the future) eligible and ready for military induction. If Congress declares a war or if the president declares a state of emergency, Selective Service transforms into a federal system that drafts young men (and possibly women) into the military. It is the precursor to a draft, and while dormant now, it is a giant ready to be awakened.

By law, failure to register is a felony with a fine up to $250,000 and five years in jail. These penalties have not been applied for decades because of the backlash of negative publicity. Instead, Selective Service developed a different, more subtle and insidious approach: the loss of opportunities, rights, and eligibility including federal college student aid (Solomon Amendment, 1982); federal job training and employment (Thurmond Amendment, 1985); veteran’s dependent benefits; and, if not U.S. born, citizenship. Many states also tie registration to state employment, state educational assistance, and enrollment in state colleges. Over the years, Selective Service even changed its wording from “don’t lose these benefits by not registering” to “register for Selective Service and earn state and federal rights and benefits.”

In the year 2000, Delaware became the first state to link Selective Service registration with an application for a driver’s license, renewal, or state identification card. It was hugely successful and increased the state’s compliance rate to almost 100 percent. Now over 45 states and territories do the same. In most states, a male cannot get a driver’s license otherwise. The system is hidden, automatic, and seamless.

Writing a letter to one’s faith or support community articulating those beliefs is unique. It begins the in-depth soul searching necessary to develop a sincere commitment to peace and nonviolence.

Selective Service and conscientious objection

The three main requirements for conscientious objection as defined by current and past U.S. law are as follows:

The CO must be conscientiously opposed to participating in any war and all war. Opposition is not political or selective. It is against any and all war. No “just” war.

The objection must be based upon moral, ethical, or religious belief. The old law’s belief in a Supreme Being was changed to training and belief.

The claim must be sincere, deeply held, or play a significant role in one’s life. Not only must this position be truly personal, but it must be documented.

By current Selective Service law, if a draft were reinstated, the worst case scenario would give a person who receives an induction notice as little as nine days to file an application for a conscientious objection classification. Aside from the challenge of preparing such an application, this allows little time for genuine soul searching, formulation, or articulation of deeply held personal beliefs. It would be woefully absent of extensive documentation that a draft board would need to verify sincerity. Long-held beliefs, especially if documented, are much more persuasive.

So, if Selective Service law does not permit making a claim earlier, what else can be done? The answer is simple. Don’t rely on the Selective Service system. Their mission is to induct people into the military, not to help COs. Here is an alternative.

Conscience is the moral cornerstone that leads a person to claim a conviction as a CO. Conscience is God’s spiritual imprint inscribed on our hearts. Nowhere is conscience so imperiled as in war.

Discernment, decision, and documentation

When my oldest son turned 18—two months before 9/11—I knew that he had to register for Selective Service and, should a draft be reinstated, he would likely seek a CO classification. To my surprise, the registration form had no place to indicate a CO status. Instead, using the recommendation from several peace groups, he wrote “I am a conscientious objector” between the blanks on the form. Two elders from our monthly meeting attested to his statement, and witnessed also on the form. Additionally, he wrote a letter to the meeting, declaring that he was against participation in any and all war; that his belief was based upon moral, ethical, and religious beliefs; and he provided examples. We asked the meeting to accept the letter, minute it, and keep a copy in its lock box. This started a longer journey, and since then almost 50 other teens, both young men and women, have written letters to the meeting.

Through Quaker House, the process has been shared with other monthly and yearly meetings and other faith communities. We sponsor workshops that help young people and their adult mentors explore their leadings toward nonviolence and conscientious objection. We developed a curriculum (see quakerhouse.org) with a full spectrum of references, materials, worksheets, exercises, and procedures that encourage and frame deeper study, discernment, and discussion. We encourage young people to examine the peace testimony from their own personal perspective, not in abstraction: What would you do if forced into military conscription? Can you participate in war? Can you kill another human being? Can you submit to the orders of a commanding officer, even when you know it may bring harm and perhaps death to another? Discernment takes time, some structured exercises, and a safe place to explore deep feelings and articulate them as beliefs in a CO letter. That is how the conscience is developed. It cannot happen nine days after getting an induction notice.

Filling out a claim “between the spaces” and keeping that as a record is a standard method of documentation endorsed by many peace organizations. Writing a letter to one’s faith or support community articulating those beliefs is unique. It begins the in-depth soul searching necessary to develop a sincere commitment to peace and nonviolence, and serves as a more significant piece of documentation should, a few years later, a draft be reinstated and the young person go before a local draft board. Every letter is distinctive, highly personal, and deeply moving. Each time, all those listening are overwhelmed with the eloquence, sincerity, and depth of conviction as these teens speak against violence and the tragic futility of war. But beyond this, the process helps these teens crystallize fundamental beliefs about conscientious objection, nonviolence, and the testimony of peace.

This was evident when we interviewed several past CO letter writers. This is what they said:

The writing of CO letters solidified and crystallized my beliefs and convictions on conscientious objection, nonviolence, and the peace testimony.

Writing my letter served as a guide for me during subsequent years, as a benchmark of my beliefs, as a reminder of my convictions, and it gave me talking points when discussing nonviolence and peace, especially with those who felt otherwise.

When I read my letter to the meeting, I was truly embraced by the meeting and for the first time actually felt like I was part of the meeting.

It was like a rite of passage.

It gave me assurance that I was more prepared both emotionally and with written documentation should a draft be reinstated.

I wouldn’t have known that conscientious objection existed if it wasn’t for my meeting.

Conscience is the moral cornerstone that leads a person to claim a conviction as a CO. Conscience is God’s spiritual imprint inscribed on our hearts. Nowhere is conscience so imperiled as in war. But conscience also must be developed and nurtured. Without attention, a conviction against personal participation in war is simply not considered. Without a focus, it gets lost. Without a focus, it stays hidden. Without planting the seeds of the peace testimony, the fruits of nonviolence never grow. Too often the opportunity to explore this part of the peace testimony lies complacent in our young people when they turn 18 and must register for Selective Service. If left unaddressed, our youth are left ill-prepared and vulnerable to a system where war is left out of the public view, and Selective Service sweeps them up unaware. Our meetings have a responsibility to bear witness to conscientious objection and nurture the conscience that lies deep within our young people.

]]>I’m a city-dwelling woman, with nothing remotely agricultural going on. I have no chickens, no garden, not even a dog—but my spiritual life features livestock.

On a recent Sunday I decided to go to worship with Friends. A decade ago I was a leader in this Quaker congregation, but I’ve rarely attended in the last few years. Walking toward the meetinghouse, I saw the back of my 94-year-old friend Ann and ran up the sidewalk to pat her on the back of her blue jacket. She turned and hugged me and said, “I thought you might be here. You have a way of showing up when you’re needed. With all these deaths lately . . .” She introduced me to her companions: “She was a great clerk. I remember her saying she was a cow, and we were her calves.”

“No, no, no,” I said, laughing. “God is a cow.” I explained to her friends: “I’ve lived with cows, and you have to show up to milk them every day at the same time, or they’re in pain. It’s all about faithfulness. You have to show up for God the same way—it’s a relationship. It’s not like a river where you come and dip your cup, and it makes no difference to the river. It’s about being there for the sacred in yourself, and for . . .” I waved my arms around, indicating some kind of flow between me and an invisible something.

Ann gripped her cane and followed us into the meetinghouse. “Oh, that’s a much better twist. I like that better.”

I took a seat in the quiet meetingroom. Half an hour or so into the silence, another old friend of mine stood up. “It’s one of those days when I can feel the Spirit alive in this room, and it has moved me to stand and speak, though I don’t know yet what I’m going to say.” She spoke about the rain on the skylight and then, looking across the room, added, “My friends tell me to take myself less seriously. I see Tina here, and I remember when she told us that God was a cow.”

I shook my head, startled, wondering why this cow story was so present.

Like much of the stuff I know, I got this image from a dream. God, a big long-horned cow, is mad at me for not showing up reliably to milk her, and she is tossing me on her horns. After one high toss, a hand reaches out and catches me.

In my youth I was responsible for the morning milking of a Jersey cow. I loved that job: leaning my head against the huge, hairy, warm wall of cow; being skillful and rhythmic with my hands; hearing the pinging stream of milk hit the bucket; and carrying the warm bucket back to the kitchen.

I knew what a burden the cow carried. I knew it would be painful, and then make her sick if we didn’t milk her twice a day, every day, same time. I would never have decided one morning to sleep in, or to skip a milking because I had something “better” to do. I was responsible to this living being, so I made it to the barn every morning.

When I had the dream—years after I knew that cow—I’d just moved back to Oregon after working at a Quaker retreat center in Pennsylvania. We started every workday there with a half-hour of silence. I cherished that quiet time together: students, staff, teachers, sitting down in the old stone-walled meetingroom, placing ourselves in the stream of the sacred to start our day.

In Oregon, I jumped back into a noisy world. Sitting down for half an hour of silence by myself every morning wasn’t even a shadowy desire; it never occurred to me. The list—clean the sinks, plant the peas, please my boss—ran my life.

Then I had the dream. It was quite a corrective to my fantasy that my failures affected no one but me. What if my inability to sit quietly every morning was causing some living being actual pain, like a cow that doesn’t get milked? Ow!

Up to that moment, I’d operated along on the river model of God, the one I told to Ann’s friends in front of the meetinghouse. If I’m thirsty I can go down to the river, but the river doesn’t know—or care—whether I come or not. The river is enormous, endless, so big that I am irrelevant to its flowing. Not that I actually thought of God as a river, but it was a good picture of my lack of obligation and my lack of importance.

That is such a different model from the cow. The river lays no burden on me, and the metaphor doesn’t begin to get at the sense of belonging and connection, of being knitted in, that I now believe is key to living a happy life.

I understood the dream’s message, but I didn’t do anything about it.

In 1984, a few years before the cow dream, I had an important dream about horses. I don’t have much waking experience of horses: I can ride but not well. Nonetheless, this jeweled fairy tale of a dream, which I call “Ask for Horses,” has stayed bright in my heart for over 30 years:

I live in a mountain village in Central Asia. Some peddlers suddenly and mysteriously arrive, and lay out trade goods on a carpet. Someone taps my shoulder. I know it is the shy, ragged person called the bird-girl, who came with the peddlers.

“Don’t turn around. Do you think they will give you a gift?”

I ponder this strange question. Why would the peddlers give me a gift? Finally, I conclude that to keep the story going I have to say yes.

The voice behind me, relieved, says, “Good. Then you must ask for horses. They will expect you to choose one of the trinkets on the carpet, but they have a herd of Siberian horses off on the steppe. They will have to give them to you if you ask. They won’t like it, but they’ll do it.”

I walk all night, working up the nerve to ask. I never ask, but I believe there is still time.

This dream went very deep into my bloodstream. Ever since I heard those whispered instructions from the bird-girl, I’ve wondered about them.

Where do I say yes to the possibility of some mysterious gift?

How do I ask not for trinkets, or what’s laid out for me, but for something so amazing and alive and challenging that it will blow my life open? Something I can’t see from here, something far away.

You could say that this story played out in 1995 when I asked my second husband to marry me (after living together for four years) so we could adopt a girl from China. The two brilliant little girls that became our daughters—now in college—are surely horses in the spirit of the dream. It was hard to ask for them; I was afraid to ask. We had to travel a long way to get them, and they did indeed blow my life and heart wide open.

Though it did play out in that miraculous way on other levels of my life, I’m still in the middle of the Ask for Horses adventure. Those questions are as alive in me as they ever were.

The cow taught me faithfulness. The horses keep teaching me courage. Ducks, on the other hand, are on a mission for joy.

They didn’t come from a dream. They came from a book about the Nonviolent Communication program. Marshall Rosenberg, who developed NVC, suggested we have these unspoken words behind any request we make:

“Please do as I requested only if you can do so with the joy of a little child feeding a hungry duck.” (Not out of fear of punishment, or a need to please. Not from guilt, shame, duty or obligation, or desire for reward.)

Judith and Ike Lasater, who wrote a book called What We Say Matters about how Nonviolent Communication works in their family, expanded this idea into a duck index. It’s a scale of one to ten. Ten is the full-on joy of feeding hungry ducks, and one is no ducks at all. When wondering whether to do something, like go to a party or take on a job, Ike and Judith check in with themselves to see how high it is on the duck index. The prospect has to have at least five ducks for them to go ahead.

I love this concept. I am a pest with it. Whenever I hear someone trying to make a decision, I leap in with the duck index. I even have my own version, which is, “I know what a yes feels like, and everything else is a no.”

I do know what a yes feels like. It happens in my chest, like warmth; or in my belly, like a gong going off; or on my skin, like goosebumps. I know what a no feels like, too: a sinking feeling in my stomach; a flooded, confused feeling in my head. But I haven’t been good on the maybes. I can easily confuse a desire to please with a yes if I’m not paying attention. Just a couple of years ago, someone I admired, a hard-working volunteer, asked me to take over the chairmanship of a committee. I said yes because I wanted his approval, wanted to belong, and wanted to be a giver instead of a taker. I didn’t check to see if there were ducks in it. If I’d checked, there would have been three ducks: not enough. And it turned out to be full of stressful inter-committee politics. I could have saved myself a pile of grief had I paid better attention to my body’s clues before I took the job.

If I really lived my days following ducks, I’d have a lot of fun, like being in a parade. But the problem is that it’s been hard for me to accept that if it’s not a clear yes, everything else is a no. In a way, my maxim is stricter than the Lasaters’ duck index—at least they have room for gradations. Mine is stricter because I’m sorely inclined to do things in the “maybe” territory.

I offer these lovely teachings to anyone who will listen:

Cow: Be faithful to a daily practice of silence and presence and listening. Accept that what you do, or don’t do, matters to the whole.

Horses: Ask big. Ask bravely. Don’t settle.

Ducks: Do only what makes your heart sing.

Those teachings came to me and stuck to me, not because I was so wise, but because I was a mess. I was almost frantic since I was about 13. I lived in more than 40 places by the time I was 40, and several more since then. All that moving made it hard to live a life that had any discipline to it. I do now have a daily habit of meditation, but it took me about 24 years after having the cow dream to calm down enough to make it happen.

I’m also naturally inclined to settle for what’s on the table (the peddler’s carpet), not to ask big. My two marriages come to mind: I expertly squeezed myself—well past the point of hurting—into relationships where I did not quite fit. I got smaller and lonelier, and, in the case of my second husband, scared. And truly, most of my life has been lived by anything but ducks. I’ve acted a million times from fear or a sense of obligation. And I will again.

The two dreams had to be dramatic to get my attention. Ducks had to come parading into my mind like a set of bells. I’m so grateful to my animal guides—not wild creatures like a bear or wolf or eagle, but beautiful everyday animals—for recognizing my need, and sticking with me all these years.

Maybe the reason that the story of God as a cow was so present at meeting on that Sunday was because it was time to write about it. Or maybe it was because I need that story right now. Four people in the meeting had died in the span of a month. One died by jumping off a building. She too was a mother of an adopted Chinese girl; I helped support her through the Chinese adoption maze. Our daughters knew each other when they were little. And the previous Saturday, my boyfriend and I broke up after eight rich years. There’s blood and heartbreak in the water right now, and I have need of the milk of that cow. It helps to be reminded not only of my obligation to show up, but of the generosity of whatever is on the other side of this arrangement—the big invisible flank I’m leaning my head on, the warm, frothy, life-giving food.

When I was a boy, people used to say that my head was always in the clouds. Looking skyward, I wondered what was up there. I watched airplanes, birds, clouds, the colors in the sky, and the breezes in the trees. When I heard an airplane or bird, my head turned upward until I spotted it. At night I dreamt about flying.

I would build a big kite out of bamboo and plastic, go to a field after school and test it, write some notes, take it home and rework it, then return the next day to test it again. At some point, I visited the kite store in San Francisco, California, and came away with a kite magazine and a few kites. The kites were fighter kites, now called “single-line maneuverable” kites. They go in the direction they are pointed until you put slack in the line; the nose shifts direction, and you pull on it. Off it goes in that new direction. “Wow! This is cool!” I thought. I began building my own. That’s about the time I discovered the American Kitefliers Association (AKA), a national kite organization full of grown people flying kites!

Kite flying has almost always taken my worries away. Once that kite leaves my hands, my worries go with it. I think it is tied to mindfulness. Many people who have hobbies or meditative activities feel stress and worries drift away, once they begin. Their stress is replaced with a sense of joy, and that joy goes with them when they leave the kite field to continue their lives.

A Quaker friend once told me that he felt that my soul was somehow tied to the great beyond, to that outer limit. At one of the Friends General Conference Gatherings in Blacksburg, Virginia, co-clerk Peggy Spohr suggested that I consider presenting a kite workshop for FGC. I started with my yearly meeting, then signed up to present at the Gathering. This past summer, I conducted my third FGC Gathering workshop.

One reason kite making fits in so well with FGC is the joy that is expressed while making kites and flying them. There are so many metaphors relating kites and flying them to the Spirit and our relationship to the Divine. Even the Hebrew word for spirit is the same as the word for wind: ruack (pronounced “roo’-akh”).

We make about four kites in our five-day Gathering workshop. The first is always an Eddy bow kite, the more stable version of the diamond kite. Then we decorate the kite before going out, where we tie the kites together and fly them cooperatively. This brings up all sorts of discussion about working together and how we need each other to “fly high.” I am reminded of the Greek myth about Daedalus and his son Icarus. Not only were they escaping prison, but I can’t help but think that they were flying toward God as they flew higher and higher. But they needed each other, and had Icarus stayed closer to his dad, they would have made it. Recall, Icarus flew too close to the sun; the wax holding his feathered wings together melted, and he plunged to his death.

We also learn how to tie several knots in the first part of the week. (This, of course, also has metaphors in life.) By learning these early in the week, we can use them throughout the week while making the other kites. We have made delta kites, indoor “floaters” made from dry cleaner bags, Rokkaku kites (Japanese hexagonal kites), box kites, and fighter kites. Typically I design my workshops so that the kites we make can be flown indoors or in very light winds, because we are usually around buildings and trees which create turbulent conditions. Our kites can be flown indoors by simply walking backward, but they can later be rebuilt with heavier sticks to fly in stronger winds when the participants get home. Also I design the kites to be dismantled so they can be safely taken home. And there is usually time to decorate the kites using permanent colored markers or acrylic paints. We always try to make time to fly them as well.

The final days of the workshop are spent building what I call the “mystery kite.” I don’t tell the workshop participants ahead of time what that kite will be, as a way to add some suspense. Really! It depends on what people want to build, in addition to what kites are more suited to that year’s participants. I always bring enough supplies to build six or seven types of kites. This gives me leeway to change throughout the week. The mystery kite tends to be more complicated, requiring skills acquired by learning throughout the week. Having a mystery kite is not unlike our life in the Spirit: oftentimes surprising; always mysterious; and, if we approach with an open mind, joyous.

What do people mean when they tell you to go fly a kite? Typically it means to get lost, go away, or leave them alone. But I find it to be a welcome invitation. Kite flying is about being joyful and loving, fun-loving and conscientious. In flying kites, like in our spiritual journeys, we must have hope, faith, and love.

]]>Nonprofit boards, religious or secular, have a legal and moral mandate to manage their organizations diligently, prudently, legally, and in ways consistent with their charters. This mandate seems self-evident, but every board encounters pressures that can distract from faithful action. If these pressures are not managed, they can weaken or destroy an organization. An organizational failure is always a failure of the organization’s board🔒

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]]>https://www.friendsjournal.org/quaker-boards/feed/03026980A Community Formed for Faithfulnesshttps://www.friendsjournal.org/marcelle-martin-community/
https://www.friendsjournal.org/marcelle-martin-community/#respondFri, 01 Sep 2017 07:05:01 +0000https://www.friendsjournal.org/?p=3026992We need to help each other grow in recognizing, discerning, and responding when the Spirit leads. 🔒 Friends Journal Member? Sign in here! Not an FJ member? To read this piece, please join us today! For $28, you'll get: A year of Friends Journal delivered to your mailbox (11 issues) and email Full, instant access to the […]

]]>Basic to our Quaker faith is our understanding that everyone has direct access to the living God; each of us can receive divine guidance and leadings of the Spirit. We want to hear and respond faithfully, but doing so is not easy. Human beings are hardwired to seek approval, focus on fear, and conform to the beliefs and norms of our culture. Essential to the Quaker🔒

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Thomas R. Kelly, “The Record of the Class of 1914.” Courtesy of Quaker and Special Collections, Haverford College, Haverford, Pa.

While doing doctoral studies at Harvard in 1931, Thomas R. Kelly, a Quaker and author of the spiritual classic A Testament of Devotion, wrote to a friend and offered an assessment of famed British mathematician Bertrand Russell. He said that Russell seemed to him like an “intellectual monastic,” fleeing to the safety of pure logic to avoid the “infections of active existence” and the “sordid rough-and-tumble of life.”

When studying the papers of Kelly at Haverford College outside of Philadelphia, cocooned in the safety of the library’s special collections room the week after the presidential election, I was struck by this remark about Russell. I realized that many have leveled the same charge against mystics like Kelly himself. They are the ones, the story goes, who flee into an interior world of spiritual experience to escape the rough-and-tumble of actual existence.

The suggestion is not unfounded. Kelly’s thinking about mysticism was carried out under the long shadow of psychologist and philosopher William James: Kelly worked with James’s understanding of mysticism as the experience of the solitary individual. Kelly was also writing in the period following Evelyn Underhill’s influential Mysticism—its twelfth edition published during the years he was at Harvard—in which she writes that introversion is the “characteristic mystic art” that aids a contemplative in the “withdrawal of attention from the external world.”

That Kelly might be branded, then, a guide to the experiences of the inner life alone seems reasonable. My research has caused me to rethink this assessment; now I see Kelly as a mystic whose life is one of commitment to the world, not escape from it. And he can be a resource for those of us searching for a worldly engaged spirituality.

I started reading Kelly when I was 32. I remember this when seeing the mark I made in the biographical introduction to A Testament of Devotion of what Kelly was doing when he was 32. Because I wanted to explore the inner life of prayer he wrote about and lived, I was as drawn to the story of his life as I was to his writings.

A lifelong Quaker, Kelly was academically ambitious, driven, convinced that success as an academic philosopher would ensure he mattered. He received a doctorate from Hartford Theological Seminary in 1924 and began teaching at Earlham College in Indiana. But he pined for the rarefied intellectual atmosphere and prestige of an elite East Coast college. In 1930 he began work on a second doctorate at Harvard, assuming this would be his ticket east. But when he appeared for the oral defense of his dissertation in 1937, he suffered an anxiety attack; his mind went blank. Harvard refused to let him try again.

This failure proved the turning point in his life. It thrust him into a deep depression; his wife feared he might be suicidal. It also occasioned his most profound mystical experience, and he emerged a few months later settled, having been, as he put it in a letter to his wife, “much shaken by an experience of Presence.”

His friend Douglas Steere, a colleague at Haverford where Kelly was teaching at the time (he made it back east), summarized how many perceived the fruit of Kelly’s experience: “[A] strained period in his life was over. He moved toward adequacy. A fissure in him seemed to close, cliffs caved in and filled a chasm, and what was divided grew together within him.”

Three years later Thomas Kelly, 47 years old, died suddenly while washing dishes. The essays published in A Testament of Devotion were written in those few years between the fissures closing and his death. He died not only a scholar who wrote about mysticism, but a mystic himself, who knew firsthand that experience of spiritual solitude purported to be the essence of religion.

Far from sinking into the solitude of mystical bliss after emerging into his new, centered life, he promptly made an exhausting three-month trip to Germany in the summer of 1938, where he lectured, gave talks at German Quaker meetings, and ministered to the Quakers there who were suffering under Hitler.

The purpose of Kelly’s trip to Germany was to deliver the annual Richard Cary Lecture at the yearly meeting of German Friends. His letters home detail his painstaking preparation. He met frequently with his translator, working through the manuscript for several hours a day to render it in German. In a tribute to Kelly that was sent to his wife following his death, his translator—a Quaker woman of Jewish ancestry—said that his presence and his message were what the German Friends needed in “a time of increasing anxiety and hopelessness.”

From the beginning of the lecture, Kelly’s florid language is on display: he comes across as an evangelist for mystical experience, the “inner presence of the Divine Life.” His purpose is to witness to the inner experience of this divine life, this “amazing, glorious, triumphant, and miraculously victorious way of life.” He’s not offering an argument for it, or a psychology of it, following James, but a description resting upon experience.

Importantly, early on, he rejects any notion that this is a merely otherworldly experience. (In the published version of this lecture more than 20 years after its delivery, Kelly’s son cut out this section, maybe because it’s technically denser than the rest or maybe because it didn’t fit the mold of relevance for spiritual writing.) Kelly believed that the Social Gospel Movement of his time had too narrow a horizon, having bracketed out the persuading, wooing power of the Eternal. It is the one place, he noted, that he agrees with theologian Karl Barth. On the other hand, the experience he’s describing does not issue in withdrawal or flight from the world. “For,” as he puts it, “the Eternal is in Time, breaking into Time, underlying Time.” In fact, the mystical opening to an eternal “Beyond” opens simultaneously to a second beyond: “the world of earthly need and pain and joy and beauty.” There is no either-or.

This is precisely the place where Kelly’s experience makes all the difference. His weeks in Germany brought him into contact with many Quakers. He saw how they were at once struggling to live under the Nazi regime in fear, anxiety, and material want while also serving their suffering neighbors.

We learn this in a 22-page letter he wrote near the end of his trip. (Kelly spent two days in France in order to write and send home this frank letter describing the situation in Germany, fearing his letters sent from Germany were being read.) He notes in the letter that though Germany is “spruced up, slicked up,” its soul echoes hollow. If you were not a Nazi, you were always afraid, he wrote, because there’s “no law by which the police are governed.” He expresses amazement at the difficulty of getting good information, lamenting the lack of a free press because of the government’s stretching its “tentacles” deep in every news source. “There are many, many,” he writes, “who pay no attention to the newspapers. Why would they?”

But he puts a human face on these generalizations. He tells the story of a man who wouldn’t pay into a Nazi-run community fund because he was caring for the wife and children of a man in a concentration camp. This man lost his job and was also sent to a concentration camp. He expresses disgust at the signs everywhere that say “No Jews!” He writes about the courage some people display in not saying “Heil Hitler,” and the crushing blow it is to the conscience of those who do say it because they have children to feed and fear retribution. “It’s all crazy, isn’t it?” he writes. “But it’s real.”

He realizes he can’t ignore this suffering, even as he reflects on returning to the relatively safe, comfortable suburbs of Philadelphia and to his position at Haverford College. God hadn’t just shown himself to Kelly in a solitary moment of mystical experience, for as he says, “The suffering of the world is a part, too, of the life of God, and so maybe, after all, it is a revelation,” a revelation he knew couldn’t leave him unchanged.

This letter describes the context in which he gave the Cary Lecture. He believed these German Friends needed to hear both the message of the possibility of a vibrant inner life, and also how this inner life invites them into a sacrificial bearing of the burdens of their neighbors and a continued search for joy, the divine glory shimmering in the midst of sorrow.

And now we must say—it sounds blasphemous, but mystics are repeatedly charged with blasphemy—now we must say it is given to us to see the world’s suffering, throughout, and bear it, God-like, upon our shoulders, and suffer with all things and all men, and rejoice with all things and all men, and we see the hills clap their hands for joy, and we clap our hands with them.

A decade ago when I read passages like this in A Testament of Devotion, the admonitions seemed tame, tinged with poetic excess. When I read this today, knowing the context of its writing, I see it differently: it’s a summons to a vocation, the vocation of seeing and acting as one in the world settled in God, open both to the deepest pain and the hidden beauty in the midst of suffering—a call to service and to faith.

The very day I was reading this lecture, holding the 80-year-old, yellowing pages in my hands, students at Haverford College were walking out of their classes in solidarity with their classmates who have lived most of their lives in this country, though illegally, to protest President Donald Trump’s proposed immigration policies. Similar walkouts were occurring on campuses across the country. That same week, Haverford students were in downtown Philadelphia protesting the police brutality they expect to continue under a Trump “law-and-order” administration.

Kelly’s lecture and letter resonate with these current events, not because of parallels between Nazi Germany and the victory of Trump—some have tried to make them, but that’s not my point. Rather, it is the suffering caused by fear (the fear immigrants, African Americans, Muslims, and refugees feel) that Kelly’s spirituality of a dual beyond—the Eternal Beyond, and the beyond within of suffering and joy—might prove able to guide us through, whenever such fear occurs. Just as Kelly’s presence and message were what the German Quakers needed to hear in their time of “increasing anxiety and hopelessness,” so too might the same message be needed in ours.

But this wisdom is useless if it’s not made concrete. There is no “suffering with all” in general, only concrete commitments to this or that person, this or that situation. Kelly knows this, and his most important point in the lecture is the exploration of the load-bearing wall of Quaker spirituality: the concern. A concern names the way a “cosmic suffering” and a “cosmic burden-bearing” become particular in actual existence. A concern names a “particularization”—one of Kelly’s favorite words—of God’s own care for a suffering world in the concrete reality of the life of this person, of this community. It is a “narrowing of the Eternal Imperative to a smaller group of tasks, which become uniquely ours.”

The Quakers in Germany can’t bear the burdens of all of Germany. But, when sensitized to the Spirit, they could discern how God’s care for the world could be made concrete, particular in their life together: in this caring for a neighbor, in this act of resistance, in this fleeting sharing in joy.

While he was reminding those German Quakers of something at the heart of their spirituality, he offered the rest of us a way out of the sense of being overwhelmed when we view the world’s suffering as a whole. “Again and again Friends have found springing up a deep-rooted conviction of responsibility for some specific world-situation.” For Kelly, mysticism included ineffable, inner experience, but also included a sense of the Eternal’s own turning in love toward the world, made concrete in particular lives and communities.

I left Haverford with these thoughts distilled into one word as I made my way back to my own community of Pittsburgh, a word that I knew, but Kelly gave to me anew: “discernment.” This is the word I want to carry, to offer to my church, the seminary where I teach, to all those who wonder how to live in the midst of suffering and fear—with the occasional upshot of joy. Discernment. How will God make concrete, particular, in my life, in my church community’s life, God’s own concern for the marginalized, displaced, and discriminated against? How will the mystical become flesh-and-blood in life’s rough-and-tumble, here and now, as it so longs to do?

For as long as I can remember, my father’s piano playing, self-taught and imperfect, accompanied the hymns at our Quaker service on Christmas Eve. Ours is not the most tuneful congregation, but it matters — theologically, even — that the hymns are created together, and not delivered to us from some perfect choir. Dad’s piano formed a line, a cord, over which we draped our ragged voices, as we together unfurled the songs.

This Christmas Eve, without his piano, the songs had no center. Raw and uncertain, our voices never settled on a single key. Others may have found that a joyful noise, but I did not. I could not. Though I will consider it a fitting noise to mark last winter, when so many of us found ourselves missing the comforting center we used to believe we had.

My parents were committed news watchers (my mother still is), and last July, during my father’s final hospital stay, he kept up that habit. Each night, he watched talking heads present the events of the Republican National Convention, and for my father that monstrous pageantry did not end when he turned off the television. As he slept — fitfully, alone in a hospital, aware that he was at the end of his days — Donald J. Trump haunted his dreams. Trump was, if not quite my father’s worst nightmare, perhaps his final bad dream.

I do not often rise to anger. But in my parents’ house one of those nights, I decided to watch the convention myself, and I felt my anger rise to disgust. A white man on stage promised law and order to an almost all-white audience , living in a nation with falling crime rates. A black man labeled his fellow black men and women rioters and anarchists because they had the nerve to declare that they deserved to live. Meanwhile, the police department led by that same man was under investigation for killing an inmate through “profound dehydration.” The water had been turned off in his cell. I had to turn off the television.

I was much calmer a few weeks later as I read an essay at my father’s memorial service. It centered around a line from Wendell Berry’s poetry: “the dark conceals all possibilities.”

I meant that line to honor my father’s investigations of the unknown: his scientific research; his world travels; even his work in his garden, dipping his hands through the darkness of dirt, which, through the only magic I believe in — the only magic I need — converts the putrefaction of death into new life. I meant to find a way to see death as a darkness that could also give us hope.

I did not know that I was already living in a different kind of darkness. Most of us in that room, during the memorial service, were. Three months later, as we watched the election results pour in, we learned we had not known the world in which we lived. I had to turn the television off again.

The next morning was in some ways harder for me than the morning my father died. I was more beaten; I was more dismayed. My father had been dying, first slowly and then quickly ; when his death arrived, I had known it was on its way. But I had failed to imagine the reality of a President Trump. I know I was not the only one. Now I see the election as a kind of reminder: we always live in darkness, and darkness conceals all possibilities — and not all possibilities are good.

My family’s arrival at Christmas Eve service used to be a production. Dad would squeeze in a few last minutes of practice at home, and then we’d stuff a lamp into the trunk of the Prius so he could read the music in the dark meetinghouse, and then we’d hustle off, to ensure an early arrival and seating close to the fire at the front of the cold meetingroom.

Last Christmas Eve, I arrived just as the service was starting, and sat alone near the back. I tried — hard — to find beauty in the tuneless, unaccompanied singing. On a pop record, you’ll hear the off-kilter harmonies of a children’s choir, intended to convey an innocent joy. Perhaps others could hear that on Christmas Eve. At best, I could tell myself that despite the gloom, despite my father’s absent through line, still we continued to sing.

I slipped out as soon as the service was over, so that I didn’t have to answer questions and greetings from acquaintances whose names I couldn’t remember. As I left, I visited the permagarden my father had helped plant behind the meetinghouse. Nothing was blooming, of course, and it was dark anyway, so all I could see were the gravestones rising in the night — old, old gravestones, which predate the construction of the meetinghouse. Though my father is not buried there, those markers reminded me that there are plans to name the garden in his honor, that this is where we plan to scatter some of his ashes (which still sit in a box in a closet), that this garden is where I will need to come whenever I want to feel a physical proximity with my dad. I rarely cry: once or twice every few years, though lately, if I watch a sentimental movie, I can feel tears close. Standing in the garden, tears finally came.

My mother and sister stayed home, not ready for hymns without my father’s accompaniment—thus my lonely presence at the back of the room. Why put myself through it? I contemplated that question the next day — Christmas, of course — as my family, diminished by one, spread ourselves across a trail in the woods.

Hiking is one of the few group activities that we all enjoy, so whenever we’re home for the holidays, we head for the woods. I walked ahead, unspooling this essay in my mind — the trail, like my father’s piano, becoming a line over which to hang ragged words and ideas.

In the months since my father’s death, I’ve arrived at a metaphor for my heart, which of course is already a metaphor. Sometimes it feels as if I’ve packed the harder emotions — anger, sure, but sadness most of all — into a black box, which I then lowered into the depths of my gut. It all occurs somehow beyond my command, beyond even my knowledge. The box sits down there, hiding its contents, which is why I went to the service: I wanted to dredge up the black box.

Yes, the dark contains possibilities. In the months since my father’s death (and in the months since the election), I have found myself becoming the person I have always intended to be. I have stopped driving so much and ride my bike around town, just like my father did. I have planted a garden, a memorial, though it hasn’t always bloomed. I have quit my job, and now when people ask me what I do, the answer is the precise dream of my childhood: I am a writer, I tell them. This flourishing is what I spoke of at my father’s memorial service: Death is difficult, but death is the price of the wildness that makes life worth living at all. The dark contains all possibilities.

But that means the dark contains too , as Wendell Berry admits in the poem I quoted , death itself. It contains despair. It contains — in my father’s last nightmare come true — the stink of despotism in our beloved democracy. But we would be fools to pretend that the bilious possibilities now exposed are novel; we were fools not to have seen them before.

This all sounds grim, but it also reminds me that in that tuneless, unaccompanied Christmas Eve singing was a kind of light: light shining down onto my heart’s black box. And there is light in our election, too. If the dark conceals all possibilities, then the light wakes us. The light clarifies. The light, I hope, can show us the way out.

]]>My sisters and I were raised in a small town in Colorado that did not have its own Quaker meeting. Though my father would sometimes drive to the next town to attend meeting, we never went as a family. My sisters and I were, at first appearance, raised outside🔒

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For many years, I thought that heaven was an abstract and irrelevant concept. At most it was a comforting and vague belief, carried forward from my childhood with no certainty or specificity. As for the future, I thought that only good people get into heaven, while hoping and assuming that I was one of the chosen. Such hopes required ignoring my less stellar behaviors, as well as the limited and occasional relationship I had with the Divine.

Since my epiphany experience, heaven has been the moment-to-moment basis of my life.

Twenty-five years ago, I was going through a time of personal crisis. While praying in meeting for worship, I was lifted to heaven and into the presence of God for ten minutes. Those minutes transformed my life. I have since been blessed with other spiritual encounters, but was in heaven only once. I took away from that brief time two certainties: God is perfect love, and heaven is forever.

Neither of these is a unique concept. I had long thought that God was loving, and had assumed the afterlife was eternal. Seeing God—being immersed, saturated, and consumed in that great love—was far more wonderful than I could have imagined. A glimpse of eternity was greater than any concept I had held, greater than I could comprehend or communicate. All these years later, I am confounded and comforted by the expansive enormity of eternity.

Having encountered perfect love, I have since looked forward to dying and returning to heaven. Some Friends have told me this is an unhealthy attitude. For me, it is the basis of a joyful life. How could it be otherwise, knowing the love that awaits me? Following my peak experience, I know God exists, loves me, and waits for me.

After my epiphany, I pondered many questions in light of what I knew of God’s love. I wondered why there seems to be little justice in this world, and what happens after death. My answers reflect decades of prayer and thought, and not what I had directly experienced. Thus, “insights” is an accurate term. I don’t know if they are true, but they are my understanding.

I’ve concluded that everyone goes to heaven; that we will spend eternity with those we have loved, helped, and harmed; and that we will be confronted with the consequences of all we have done.

There are a number of passages in the Bible that refer to some exclusivity about getting into heaven, and that those who don’t make it end up in hell where they encounter the Devil. The only evil I have encountered in my spiritual life is the potential that resides in me.

I don’t believe that humans are inherently sinful. Instead, we are souls temporarily wrapped in the skin of an animal. If I were to let loose the hungers that arise from my being an animal, I would cause great harm. When joined by other people, I could be part of horrific actions. As for hell, I can’t conceive of perfect love condemning anyone to eternal, impossible-to-rectify misery.

On the other hand, I also can’t understand how humans—limited and flawed as we are—can convince ourselves that we will spend eternity in perpetual bliss. None of us deserves that. We have all acted in ways that are contrary to the example of perfect love. God loves us not because we have earned or deserve it, but because God is infinitely merciful. Time and again, I have fallen on my face and crawled to God asking for forgiveness, and I am forgiven.

I cannot, however, fool myself that God’s forgiveness means that all is forgotten: forgiven, yes; forgotten, no. I am convinced that there is justice in eternity.

The central reality in heaven is our immersion in love. When I experienced it, God’s love for me was greater than the love all mothers throughout the history of the world have felt for their children. This great love waits for each of us and will be our central reality, the ground of our being. Resting in this love, our eyes will be opened. As humans, we see and understand little. Our only infinite capacity is self-justification. In heaven, the blinders come off, and we will see our actions and their widespread consequences.

Some of these sights will be wonderful. I have seen the souls of my father and grandfather waiting for me on a pine-studded shore, where we canoed together. Joyful reunions will start eternal celebrations of loving relationships. The results of our compassionate acts while on earth will be revealed, many of them traveling far further than we realized.

Other sights will be very painful. Whether deliberate or thoughtless, we will see the full effects of the harm we caused. The outcomes of our participation in societal and national actions will be undeniable. The willful ignorance of injustice, suffering, poverty, starvation, and illness that so many in affluent countries practice will be seen.

I expect that in addition to those I loved and helped that I will spend eternity with the souls of those I hurt and harmed. I have an image of spending that time with the soul of a child from the developing world who died of disease or malnutrition on my lap. I did not cause the death, but didn’t do enough to prevent it.

The judgment that I fear after death is not God’s or St. Peter’s, but mine. Our time on earth is an opportunity to grow in holiness, acting as agents of God’s mercy. I am sobered by the thought of forever facing what I could have done when alive. This reality propels me to grow in compassion and generosity while always humbly seeking God’s will.

This is not a vision of heaven that many want to hear, but how can it be otherwise? Many mystics have stated that we are all one, joined together in God’s heart before we were born, and again when we die. It is only when we’re on earth that we’re oblivious.

My understanding of heaven influences my daily life. I am filled with spiritual joy and gratitude. What’s the worst that could happen in any given circumstance? I could die and go to heaven. It also determines my view of others. There is no “us and them,” not even a “you and me”; we are all one. What hurts or helps you, hurts or helps me. I must spend my life loving God and my fellow humans, while carrying out the tasks put before me. I live in the knowledge that I am loved, now and forever.

]]>https://www.friendsjournal.org/mystical-heaven/feed/13026437A Simple State of Being That Never Truly Dieshttps://www.friendsjournal.org/simple-state-of-being/
https://www.friendsjournal.org/simple-state-of-being/#commentsTue, 01 Aug 2017 07:00:31 +0000https://www.friendsjournal.org/?p=3026441Moving toward death is its own kind of expectant worship. 🔒 Friends Journal Member? Sign in here! Not an FJ member? To read this piece, please join us today! For $28, you'll get: A year of Friends Journal delivered to your mailbox (11 issues) and email Full, instant access to the world’s largest online library of Quaker information: […]

]]>I was present for the births of my three sons, and I was present for the deaths of both my parents. All five incidents occurred before I became a Quaker and were benchmarks for my understanding of life and death.
Years before these life-changing moments had happened, I taught an elective course on death and dying in our local high school English🔒

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My mom died of cancer when I was 12, which lit the spark for my 40-year career as a children’s oncologist. The culture in 1950s’ Britain was to avoid discussing death, especially around children. I wasn’t told of her passing until three days later, on a brief excursion home from my boarding school. Twenty-five years later, I immigrated to America and by chance was introduced to Quakers in Columbus, Ohio. It was a troubling time in my life. I had ended my marriage and was struggling with the stresses of culture shock and long-distance parenting. But I knew I’d found an instant spiritual home in that worshipful silence and its encouragement to listen prayerfully for the still, small voice. Something about being received by loving Friends and listened to without judgment let me finally start to shed the cumulative grief I had suppressed since early adolescence.

I’m often asked how I could spend my working life around seriously ill children, often close to death, and remain fulfilled. I’ve come to see that such work gives back at least as much as I bring to it: in intimate, loving relationships with these young people, families, and coworkers. The artificial barriers we erect fall away.

Caring for these children came to be a profound source of comfort. They inspired me not only through their courage and resilience, but also by their seeming acceptance of the hand fate dealt them. Though some would recover and lead healthy lives, many would not. It wasn’t in my job description to take time at the end of the day to sit on their beds and learn about their lives, and share something of my own. It was at the bedside of these children and families that I had the chance to touch the core of the doctor–patient relationship. Part of me certainly felt a sense of failure that I couldn’t always offer effective treatment. But in the face of a five-year-old’s incurable cancer, I also realized how my presence at the end served a purpose. I’d moved from busy fixer to silent witness, from objective professional to listening companion.

Becoming a Quaker taught me belief in “spirit medicine.” I’m happy to say most medical schools now have coursework on dying and on spirituality in medicine, but I learned almost everything I know from my patients—by paying good attention and finding out what worked. And thank heaven for humor: it can sometimes make the unbearable bearable. My friend Patch Adams says, “Show me the evidence that solemnity ever cured anything!” And to paraphrase G.K. Chesterton, children like angels can fly, because they take themselves lightly.

My Quaker beliefs made me aware how vital it is to bring body, mind, and spirit to work each day and, since there is that of God in everyone, to be ready to find that still, small space not just in every person but in every situation. Whenever I could remember to bring a small part of the meditative silence of Quaker worship to the bedside, it could come to feel more like communion than conversation. This was the one thing that let me make a true connection. Children are often more in touch with their spiritual selves than grown-ups, perhaps especially so when confronting a life-endangering illness.

Soon after I became an attending physician in a university hospital, a 16-year-old boy with advanced bone cancer (I’ll call him “Brian”) was referred to me by a radiation oncologist. When I first went into his hospital room, he was stretched out on a gurney in obvious pain, his parents on either side. It wasn’t until I came closer and our eyes met that I saw abruptly that this whole scenario was an uncharted sea for me. I’d never had to tell a patient, let alone an adolescent, that I had little to offer save comfort. I’d certainly never uttered that spectral D word. In all the conversations I’d been present at between senior doctors and patients, I’d never seen true candor shown. None of my teachers had even talked privately about how such dialogues should go; it wasn’t in the teaching curriculum.

So here I was, and here the buck stopped. I couldn’t duck the truth and be true to myself. I sensed the tension in the room, but Brian was holding my look, like it was high time someone talked to him about what was going on. I had a strong intuition to talk to Brian directly, and not wait till I could talk about him behind his back with his parents. I pulled my chair up close to his side, put a hand on his forearm, and asked about his symptoms, whether he was getting enough pain meds (it didn’t look like it), and how his treatments had been. He was hard to draw out until I asked about how he liked to spend his time. He loosened up, mentioned friends who came around, managed a wry grin about missing so much school. After a bit, I brought his parents in on the conversation, asking them what the other doctor had told them. They were awkward talking freely in front of Brian, but when they saw I wasn’t in a rush to leave and was encouraging them to open up a little, things began to flow. And that dreaded C word—cancer—came up for what was surely the first time among the three of them.

For my part, I had another, happier epiphany: listening largely in silence was a whole lot easier than filling the air with words. It gave me the chance to sense not just their understanding but the emotional temperature among them—and gave me time to frame my own approach. I started talking about what it really meant for treatments to stop working. I told them about chemotherapy, what they could reasonably expect and at what expense in terms of side effects. I let each bit sink in, while giving myself time to breathe and take in their response. I told them they must weigh things among themselves and not rush their decision—and that I’d be happy to look after Brian, help with his pain and other symptoms, whether or not he chose to get the chemo. They didn’t ask about the future, and no one used the D word, but its presence was palpable.

I looked after Brian throughout the next six weeks until his death. He didn’t speak freely in his parents’ presence, but we found opportunities to talk privately and frankly about what to expect as his time approached. What I learned from my teenaged mentor was that he didn’t fear death, but did worry about how desperately hard it would be for his parents. He seemed to accept that his short life had meaning and had served some purpose. Raised in a high Anglican religious tradition, he believed quite simply that there was a heaven awaiting him. He talked less and less toward the end, so I allowed us both to take comfort from the growing quiet of his private room. I told him about my Quaker form of worship, and had the strong sense he understood that my sitting with him silently was a prayerful act.

After his death, I was talking to another pediatric oncologist about my conversations with Brian, and she told me she felt it better to “tell all the truth but tell it slant,” rather than come right out and tell a young person that they were going to die.

Later in my career, I became the medical director of a children’s hospice, giving me many opportunities to visit children with incurable and life-limiting illnesses in their homes. I was usually able to be at the bedside when a child died. I became very close to a four-year-old girl, Marie, whose treatments were no longer working. When she came home for the last time, Marie made it clear she didn’t want to sleep in her bedroom anymore. Her mom told me she’d been frightened of something—perhaps some presence—in there, though her daughter wasn’t able to articulate what bothered her. Marie was insistent about wanting to have her family close at hand at all times, so they made up a comfy mattress-bed on the living room floor, and her parents took turns sleeping beside her. Then on the evening before her death, she suddenly announced to Mommy that she wanted to go back into her bedroom “to play with my friends.” Within minutes of being tucked in her own bed for the first time in several weeks, she closed her eyes and slipped away. We were left to ponder the somehow comforting mystery of who those friends of hers might be.

I wrote the following requiem for Marie, and for other children I have known and lost.

Flowers and Soldiers

An ill-timed final frost felled my March azalea regiments;a happening no more rational than the child’s death.Last night they’d paraded, stems erect, my guard of rose and crimson,shedding their wind-jarred petal-deck to mark my frontier posts.Like this chosen child they’d shimmered shortly in an early sun.Now my nursery box brims with their brave residue.Their soldier paint has run to rust in the crevices of cedar chip,they who left without notice, unwilling that age should wrinkle them.

How to talk about death and dying to very ill people and their families is only now finding a place in medical school curricula. Many students still get little training in how to break bad news. The paraphernalia of medical care can keep people alive almost indefinitely, even when we feel we are acting against our conscience. To break bad news “well” requires a capacity for closeness. Such a connection between doctor and patient must come not from our technical training but from our hearts—heart in its ancient sense, as the place where intellect and emotion and spirit converge in the human self. This in turn asks the gift of our presence, the gift of our time. The word servant comes from the Greek, θεραπς (theraps), from which we get therapist. But servant also means attendant, and nowadays that label gets attached to us doctors—the “attending” physician. To my mind, the best attendings are those who can bring to their work what the Tibetan Buddhists call compassionate objectivity, especially in the care of dying patients.

At the time of my retirement, I took the notion to write a letter to my mother, who by then had been dead for 50 years. I had recently taken to writing occasional longhand letters, especially to my sisters, as a small protest against the impersonality of email correspondence. I had no expectation that she might “get” my letter in some non-earthly delivery, but I’d discovered that writing letters to our beloved dead is an ancient epistolary art form. It features in both C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed and in Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s The Wheel of Life. There are surviving fragments of such letters written on papyrus, pottery bowls, and linen dating from Egypt’s Old Kingdom (2700–2200 B.C.E.). The word “mourning” derives from the Indo-Germanic for remembering, that Scott Becker and Roger Knudson described in 2003 as “moving into the mythopoetic space in which the living and the dead coexist.”

In the heyday of letter writing, letters must have felt like direct oral communication, a continued conversation between two people physically distant from each other. They would have arrived on your doorstep with the expectation of a reply, so perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised to receive a prompt one from Mom. In October 2007, three weeks after writing my letter, my sister Elizabeth’s husband died after a long illness. Back at her house after the funeral, Elizabeth produced a letter with a British stamp on the envelope, and the date and place of mailing clearly visible: Weston-super-Mare (our childhood home in England), December 31, 1954. Ten days before our mother died.

“John, I was going through several boxes that we’d left undisturbed for years,” Elizabeth told me, “and I came across this unopened letter from 1954. Isn’t it astonishing? It even talks about her wanting you to become a doctor.”

The letter read in part:

My darling Elizabeth, Mary, Jane and John, my best beloveds, I shall not be far away from you, always watching your proud achievements. . . . John, I hope you set your goal early on and go for it. I think you will choose medicine . . . remember the two principles I instilled in you—Faith and Fortitude.

God Bless you, Mummy

I told my sister that I didn’t remember our mother ever bringing the idea of a medical career up to me: “And to think that’s what she wanted for me all along. The really astonishing thing, though, is that I wrote a letter to her less than a month ago, telling her all about what I ended up doing with my life.”

I think the word “afterlife” is something of a misnomer. It seems to lend credence to the idea espoused by many religions that we are still living in some quasi-mortal sense after we die. The term “after-death” seems simpler and has no such connotations. Believing every one of us has that of God within leads me to think that is what does persist after our deaths. But does that something continue to have some kind of after-death connection to our best beloveds, or even to others we’ve known on this earth? We’ll just have to wait and see.

The author (center) with her sister Bonnie (left) and mother. Photo taken a few months before Bonnie’s death. Photo courtesy of the author.

The morning after my little sister died, I found my mom sobbing in her bed. She was turned to one side, her back to me, crumpled atop the blanket on her old, uneven mattress. She wore street clothes, a blouse and soft slacks. I could see her face was red and wet. Now in addition to my own pain was the helplessness of seeing my unselfish, ever-believing mother that way. It didn’t seem right, and I immediately began to cry too. I hadn’t felt angry about Bonnie’s passing til that moment, and it ignited me, like a hot ember seeking to scald.

“We trusted God! We trusted Him,” I wailed, tears pouring from my eyes. “How could He let this happen? We believed! He was supposed to heal Bonnie! We believed!”

I stood there feeling mocked by the One who was supposed to be the lover of my soul; the One who said we could carry all things to Him and find rest; the One who promised that the faith of a mustard seed could move mountains.

What was keeping a 15-year-old alive just a while longer so she might receive a double lung transplant? That should be nothing to Him. She was healthy in every other way.

We did nothing but praise God. We had turned our lives to Him holding nothing back. We had moved from small town to small town, often subsisting on sacrificial wages so my dad could preach in Quaker churches. I frequently endured ridicule for being the new kid, and I had turned the other cheek. Where was God now?

My mother’s eyes grew wide, and she sat straight up in bed, her whole countenance suddenly clean and bright.

“God did heal Bonnie,” she said with absolute calm. “Just not in the way we expected.”

My anger extinguished as soon as it had sparked. I collapsed into bed with her for the first time since I was a child. Now at age 17, I soaked her shirt with the salt of my tears.

The days after that were strange.

First was the body. It was odd to be let into the large, wood-paneled room with an open casket in the center. I was both excited and frightened to see her. My dad had asked me to choose the clothes to bury her in. I remember wanting her to be stylish but not overdressed—cool, hip, yet classic and uniquely her. I wondered if she would be flattered, appalled, or relieved that I was choosing her last outfit. Many kids from school would see her. How does one dress a young corpse? This was never a feature in any of my teen magazines. As I packed the bag for the funeral home, I remember asking myself, “Would she need socks? Undergarments?” I hated having to think of these things.

The mortician had applied thick foundation and makeup to Bonnie’s face. She was a shriveled, cold, firm version of herself. There but not there. I touched her hand. It also had makeup on it.

The wake wouldn’t begin for at least an hour. What would we do? “Let’s pray around her,” my dad suggested.

As soon as we began speaking, I became aware of her presence in the room. I felt her energy, but she was hovering behind me outside the circle. I felt her, this Light of bright radiance. I knew she was there! I felt two other presences with her, this semi-human-shaped orb of presence. My back was turned, but I sensed it as almost blue in color. The other presence was ancient. It appeared almost gray in color, hovering near the top of the room. I didn’t turn to look, and I was not afraid. I was joyful. Bonnie was there—this sudden intensity in both the reunion and the separation.

It had never crossed my mind that Bonnie might die, despite the severity of her medical condition: she was on a waiting list for a double lung transplant. We never discussed it. We were assured that she would have a new set of lungs before then. An eventual transplant was assumed, as though she would need braces for her teeth someday.

She was two years younger than me, salutatorian of her class. She was studious and a whiz at math, always ahead of me in that subject. She was taller than me, blonde, had a serious disposition, and was a voracious reader. She had deep friendships, but navigating social scenes was always easier for me. We annoyed one another to no end. Yet when times were tough we pulled together.

Months before she died, Bonnie read a book, Embraced by the Light, about a woman’s near-death experience. I sat on the floor of her bedroom one evening as she described it to me. I was rarely in her room. The author, Betty J. Eadie, described the pre-existence of souls in a heavenly space. Eadie said we choose our bodies and our families.

There were so many things that were hard about our family at the time, and I found it amusing to consider that I had somehow wanted the life around me. Through squinted eyes I said, “Why do you think you chose to be my sister then?” Quickly she replied, “If we weren’t sisters, there’s no way I would hang out with you on purpose.”

A heavy pause led to bubbling laughter. I knew this to be true for both of us.

After her death, I wanted to know if she had felt pain? What were the last moments like? Was she afraid? Where was she now? What was she doing? These questions plagued me.

Late one night a few weeks after her funeral, there was a knock at the door. We weren’t expecting company. I held back, curious and surprised by a visitor.

“I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry to come so late and unannounced.” It was Mama Lewis, a well-known woman in the community. She was a substitute teacher, a local pastor’s wife with a larger-than-life personality and a thick Southern accent. There is an understood level of competition between pastor families in small towns, but there can be an intimacy too, unspoken in the shared experience of a public and private life.

I remember Mama Lewis standing there, her black hair with wisps of gray wildly combed outward above thickly framed glasses. Her body was heavy and strong in the entryway of our aging home. She had never visited here before.

“I just had to come right away. I had to tell you what happened,” she said, her eyes wide and rimmed in wet magenta.

She said it was about Bonnie, and we huddled, mouths open. I stood there confused and intrigued by the sound of her name, which I had been hearing less and less.

“I was vacuuming in my home,” she began. “And I was thinking of Bonnie. As I stood there in the landing of my stairs, I heard a voice, and it quoted the scripture, ‘In my Father’s house, there are many rooms . . .’ and then the voice went on to say, ‘and this one is Bonnie’s.’”

She said she turned and was filled with a vision. She saw my sister in a bedroom. She described the space, and it was nearly identical to my sister’s physical room in our house. She described the rose tones and pale blues, the flowers, the flowing curtains. She said Bonnie was in the middle of the room. Her hair was caught in a breeze and she was shining. She said her cheeks were so pink, as were her lips and nail beds too. This was notable because in the weeks before Bonnie had passed, her oxygen levels had dropped and those parts of her skin were often tinged a slight blue.

I was dazzled by the account—curious and comforted. If there is some sort of afterlife, I don’t think we get permanently stuck in our earthly designs. But I do think there is a message of landing in a place that is comfortable and good, with new healed bodies . . . as mysterious as it all is, this nebulous fate that awaits us all.

I trusted Mama Lewis: the passion in her voice, the way she trembled. When she spoke, I felt her too: Bonnie.

My mother tells the story that my sister was nearly four weeks overdue. It was summer, and she was swollen, miserable, and desperate. She found herself reading Psalm 30 alone in the darkness. The psalm is about deliverance and finding comfort and favor in the One. Whatever dismay we feel in our sense of separation will be bridged. The passage assures that God will provide healing—even celebration—turning our weeping into joy. “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes the morning” (Psalm 30:5). She vowed to make the baby’s middle name Joy. Her contractions began the next morning.

That same verse is now etched on my sister’s tombstone.

The Bible says a day in heaven is like a thousand years for us. I started doing the math: 15 minutes. We’ll all be together again in roughly 15 heavenly minutes, maybe less. Times of prayer and aching sometimes feel like text messages sent back and forth. “On my way.” “On my way!” “I’ll be there soon.”

Together we move, companions on this journey, not knowing when we will arrive, exactly what it will be like, or whom we will encounter when we get there. We simply reach out for connection in any place or person where the Spirit may be found. Joy meets us in the discovery—tiny tastes of what is to come. Lord Jesus, we wait.

During a chaotic senior year of college, I found religion in bees. Ants held the deepest truth I had ever known, and scientific papers on slime molds (a multinucleate amoeboid plasmodia) triggered existential crises. In the spring of 2015, I wandered around Earlham College in a hazy metacognitive state, looking at how groups and ideas interact through a stolen and unabashedly misappropriated scientific lens. As I tried to pin down wily concepts for my biology comprehensive exams, finish out my service scholarship program, and manage living in an intentional community of nine people, I found a strange manic solace in the decision-making processes of eusocial organisms.

Despite my stress-induced delirium, the question that plagues all college seniors did not leave me respite: “What next?” echoed around my head throughout the semester. Due to a timely recruiting visit, I found the answer to be Quaker Voluntary Service (QVS), a radical year of faith and service that fit into my buzzing worldview.

Superorganisms

The crux of my existentialism lay in the similarity of decision-making processes in natural organisms. In studies of slime molds, bees, ants, brains, and primate groups, I saw scientists documenting how once a buildup of evidence reaches a critical threshold, a choice is made that impacts the livelihood of an entire codependent group.

The terms “superorganism” and/or “eusocial” describe a particular type of life strategy of some species that involves a division of labor and extremely high social cooperation. Eusocial insects (some ants, bees, and termites) are considered to be superorganisms because many worker individuals do not reproduce individually. Rather, one sole delegate—the queen—carries out reproduction for the entire colony. The term superorganism denotes an understanding that though there are many bees in a hive, it is functionally a single reproductive entity. The bond of a eusocial organism is fierce because it is a group of mutually dependent (and genetically identical) individuals. They have a single, common goal: survive and reproduce.

Nest Site Decisions—A Consensus

There is a joy I find in nest site decisions that I will share with anyone who asks, and with many who don’t. A eusocial insect group’s decision on nest site beautifully highlights a moment in which the colony relies on the transfer of knowledge from a few informed individuals to the clueless colony in order to create an accurate, cohesive movement vital to their success. This phenomenon provides a unique area of study in decision making, allowing for insights on universal themes, such as speed-accuracy tradeoffs in a decentralized system.

Small, rock-dwelling ants (Temnothorax albipennis) often have their homes disrupted. When a rock is overturned, scouts rush out into the world to inspect potential new sites. A worker finds an opportunity, runs back to the colony, and recruits another individual to come look at her discovery. (This is called tandem running.) The recruit looks at the site and makes an assessment. If she, too, finds it to be exciting, she’ll run back and begin recruiting. This is a positive feedback loop of information. Once there is a critical threshold of excited individuals (a quorum) running back and forth between the old site and the potential new home, the entire nest emigrates to this new, happy home.

Similarly, honey bees (Apis mellifera) recruit their sisters to new hive sites through an extremely cute method of communication called “waggle dancing.” The higher the quality of the potential new home, the more enthusiastically the bees waggle their abdomens and,consequently, the faster they are able to recruit and hit that threshold for emigration.

A vital aspect of these decision-making processes is that scouts recruit other workers to a site, but all scouts actually inspect the potential site for themselves before becoming recruiters. Through this amazing process, individual assessments are translated through the group to make a collective decision.

My Recruitment into QVS

In the midst of my stressful final semester, I was in charge of trying to dispel an alarming sense of apathy that had overtaken the Bonner Scholars service program. At a party I attended, a freshman asked me in a slurring drunken stupor: “Do you think Bonner makes meaning out of meaningless things?” I was incensed by this question and felt the need to bring to the attention of my peers the fact that they had skin in the game: finding meaning in service is the job of the individuals involved. The structure of the Bonner program existed for them to use and personalize, not to exploit for its financial benefits and then bemoan. I stood in front of some 50 pairs of eyeballs and asked questions, trying to spur communication and a sense of responsibility for the state of things. There was some lack of oversight going on, but that meant there was room to reclaim the narrative.

That night Ross Hennessy, QVS’s Philadelphia coordinator and part-time recruiter, was sitting in the back of the room. He got in front of our agitated group and began talking about why we might choose to be in community. Do we want to be a part of a system that is self-affirming, or something that is challenging? He lifted up the value of being confronted by people you love, and I saw the hum of bees in that idea. Feedback loops circled through my neuron system, and I fairly well made up my mind that the QVS program was going to be the right decision for me.

Quaker Voluntary Service: My Household Is a Superorganism

The cohesion of an ant group (and most social groups) is genetic, but the interconnection I found in Quaker Voluntary Service is ideological. I lived with seven other people for one year in the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia. We all worked at nonprofits in the city, coming home at night to cook dinner, do our chores, talk at length, and sleep.

In our “nest” there was a common commitment to the process we would use to explore our year together, and inescapable proximity to cooperative ideas and information sharing. I saw our communal narrative as a collective decision. If I tell you a story of injustice, am I not recruiting you into a different worldview? During my year in QVS I found that, in unbeknownst alliance with my admiration for eusocial insects, Quakerism theologically encourages individual assessment and transfer of information to the group.

Our house was often in conflict with competing ideas and assessments of what to do in order to live into sustained movement toward a better world. How much “self-care” is needed? What are the boundaries of community? How much space do men take up in this group? We pushed and shoved, ideologically. Sometimes, we agreed. I found beauty in the averaging, resilience in the skirmish. The divinity in my year of simple living existed in the positive and negative feedback of my housemates.

Speed vs. Accuracy Tradeoff: Quakers and Racial Justice

For house-hunting ants, harsh conditions during nest emigration make speed essential. One group of scientists found that quorum thresholds, or the number of individuals needed to make a decision, are lowered in Leptothorax albipennis colonies exposed to wind, and that these ants were less discriminating between sites. In contrast, in the presence of calm weather, the control groups were able to choose the best site at their leisure.

We cannot talk about consensus decision making without recognizing the excruciation found in hours-long deliberation over a collective choice. Quakers try to incorporate all opinions, giving each equal weight and recognition, and that can really take forever. This is laughable when we consider the question of which color to paint the walls, but can be problematic for a more serious decision, such as how to respond to racial injustice.

I have heard negative experiences trickle through the grapevine of my housemates. While advocating for racial justice within the Religious Society of Friends, they have come into cultural clashes with larger systems of Quakers, some of who cry out against movement because it is “not in their language”: not in the language of peace, inclusion, and tolerance. There seems to be a desire within Quakerism to choose the best way to move forward calmly, deliberately, accurately, and at leisure. When I told a black woman Friend that I was attending the White Privilege Conference, she responded with something along the lines of “Why do you white people need to keep talking to yourselves in rooms? Just do something!”

At the same time I was studying ants and their choices, I came upon an article that was being read by a classmate in a women’s and gender studies class: Audre Lorde’s reflections on anger. Her first example of how her voice as a black woman had been delegitimized by white women (even those “on her side”) is pertinent to the predicament of the larger structures of Quakerism today, and reflects a speed vs. accuracy tradeoff we face as an American society:

I speak out of direct and particular anger at an academic conference, and a white woman says, “Tell me how you feel, but don’t say it too harshly or I cannot hear you.” But is it my manner that keeps her from hearing, or the threat of a message that her life may change?

Lorde states later: “Anger is loaded with information and energy.” In the long negotiations of peaceful white folks, we are not able to hear the information and energy of the oppressed. A few Quakers of color and some white allies are unduly burdened in trying to drag the body to the living edge of radical faith. I am worried that Quakers will deliberate for too long as they wait in silence for the correct choice, all the while perhaps ignoring those they “cannot hear” due to harshness or the threat it poses to comfort. There is insidious white supremacy inherent in a religion largely comprised of the input of white individuals, and it often manifests as systemic complacency. This occurs while maintaining a high-minded narrative of being on the correct side of history.

There are some times when it is important to be quick, and other times when time is needed to be precisely accurate. In our current, stressful sociopolitical environment, it is necessary to be swift in listening to the energy of the individuals in our group who are angry, who need our help. I hope that the larger Religious Society of Friends can coalesce around the choice to support people of color however they can, to admit to systemic white supremacy, and to act in accordance with anti-racist principles.

The Relationship Between the Individual and the Group

Quakerism has been an important structure for me to learn in and from. I still live with housemates from QVS, and I feel clued into something larger than myself through my relationships with them. This household of former QVS participants still feels right to me in a way that the entirety of Quakerism and its social baggage does not yet. I have confidence that somehow the radical love and commitment to justice I find in my house is being translated and manifested into society through our individual efforts. I believe in the power and energy of an idea, like a waggle dance, to recruit. In my existential world of ants and bees, ideas don’t even necessarily live entirely in our brains or bodies but rather somewhere in the space between tandem running and Spirit. I have faith that, despite all odds, we will choose a more inclusive and just society than exists today.